Blood and Politics (3 page)

Within the movement, two political trends, mainstreaming and vanguardism, vie for strategic hegemony. The differences between the two are somewhat akin to the distinctions between reformists and revolutionaries. They both seek the same goal but differ over the manner in which they work toward it. Broadly speaking, mainstreamers believe that a majority (or near majority) of white people can be won over to support their cause, and they try to influence the existing structures of American life. Vanguardists think that they will never find more than a slim minority of white people to support their aims voluntarily, and they build smaller organizations of highly dedicated cadres with the intention of forcefully dragging the rest of society behind them.

As a way of illustrating this, I focus on the two personalities who epitomize these trends, Willis Carto and William Pierce.
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Each man differs in both temperament and strategy. Carto showed up first. He was an opportunist by disposition, intent on building a road from his post on the outer edge of respectability into the political mainstream. Pierce appeared a decade later, a Lenin-like revolutionary, recruiting an elitist cadre into a vanguard force aimed at puncturing a degenerate society and seizing power. Carto and Pierce held each other in mutual personal contempt. And like elderly godfathers, they helped sire the movement that followed them. The conflict between Carto and Pierce, as well as the contention between their respective strategic orientations, shapes our story from the beginning to the end.

Blood and Politics
tells this story in a chronological fashion. Prior to the 1970s neither Carto nor Pierce was particularly prominent in the ranks of white resistance to desegregation and the black freedom movement, though Carto was active in those years, sharpening his fund-raising skills, oiling up his numerous organizational weapons, and setting a bifurcated pair of ideological sights. That early part of the story should be considered a preface to what follows.

When a resurgence of white supremacist activity began in the mid-1970s, the footprints of both Pierce and Carto were found at almost every point. At that time, baby boomers such as David Duke imbued uniforms from the vanquished past, such as Klan robes and Confederate battle flags, with fresh style and vigor. But Klan groups were not the only ones to grow. An innovative breed of Christian patriots invoked a pre–Civil War form of constitutionalism lathered with an intense religiosity. And they found new adherents among economically distressed farmers in the Midwest. Also, a ganglion of would-be academics started rewriting the Nazi nightmare out of history and reappears at several significant points in this story. During this period paramilitary survivalists first emerged as well, and they stockpiled weapons and established rural campgrounds. All these factions shared a set of common beliefs about the supposedly dispossessed status of those they deemed white. And the influence of either Willis Carto or William Pierce or the strategic trends they represented could be found in each permutation.

In the mid-1980s a small band of warriors electrified the movement with a stunning series of bank robberies and killings. That particular cycle of violence ended with criminal indictments and trials, although the impulse for murder and mayhem was not permanently stilled. And a white power music scene added young people to the vanguardist mix. After an important trial in 1988 of several of the most significant figures, however, the movement’s vanguardist trend felt the squeeze, and mainstreaming
became the more dominant strategy. David Duke was elected to the Louisiana legislature.

Despite self-imposed limits, no iron wall separated white supremacists from the larger society. Instead, a semipermeable membrane allowed influences and pressures to flow in both directions. After years of torchlight rallies, preaching, radio broadcasts, and grassroots organizing, the movement has found a distinctive “Middle American” constituency and created a set of counterculture institutions.

A decisive moment occurred in 1990–1991, when the Cold War ended, the Soviet bloc collapsed, and German unification effectively concluded the post–World War Two era. This change of historical epochs has been much commented on by others, particularly as it has affected international alignments and the emergence of ethnic nationalist movements in the Balkans and Caucasus regions. These same events also had an impact on the white supremacist movement at home.

While the Cold War and anticommunism obviously influenced domestic political alignments for more than four decades, they also helped shape Americans’ sense of themselves as a people—that is, our national identity. We were defined, in part, by who we were not. We were not communists. Now communists were not communists; thus a new question presented itself: Who are we as Americans? This subliminal change in political atmospherics broke open a long-simmering dispute among American conservatives. Several stalwart Republicans who had supported foreign intervention during the Cold War suddenly jumped over to the anti–Persian Gulf War camp and isolationism. As a result, a new version of America first nationalism appeared. This was not the civic nationalism born of the Enlightenment, defined by state borders and the individual rights of an informed citizenry. Instead, it most resembled ethnic nationalism, marked by race and religion. These nationalist conservatives spun out to the edges of political respectability, where they converged with the mainstreaming wing of the white supremacist movement.

Even as these geopolitical tectonics shifted all around them, the ideological outlooks of Willis Carto and William Pierce did not change. Instead, within the larger political universe, the significance of their movement changed. A transformation occurred, and a white nationalism was born in opposition to the New World Order.

This new form of white nationalism is best exemplified in the (momentary) conjunction of two prominent political figures from dissimilar backgrounds: Republican Pat Buchanan and David Duke. As it would be impossible to fully understand Willis Carto without keeping William Pierce in mind, it is also necessary to see both godfathers at once when
looking at David Duke. And without understanding the insurgency David Duke first represented, the meaning of Pat Buchanan’s trajectory will remain a mystery. In the 1990s Buchanan captured most of Duke’s electoral energy and cemented it to the edge of the Republican Party. Paramilitary survivalism moved from isolated compounds into the militia and a meaner gun lobby, which found support in Congress. And Holocaust deniers wagered that German unification would boost their influence. Overall, mainstreamers were filled with great expectations.

The achievements of Willis Carto’s strategic followers, however, did not translate into success for him personally. After a multimillion-dollar bequest was received by one of Carto’s corporate fronts, a group of its employees started a dispute with him in the mid-1990s over the fund’s ultimate disposition. And what began as the most triumphal moment in his fund-raising history actually turned into his greatest organizational failure.

After the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, William Pierce, on the other hand, gained new fame because of a link between a book he had written and the bomber. Vanguardists also experienced some organizational fortune in the wake of this event. But the authorities arrested several squads of would-be revolutionaries and for a moment shut down that wing of the movement. By that time, however, white nationalists had already become a cutting-edge force, cowcatchers at the front of a more respectable conservative right-wing train. Scientific racists enlisted academics and scholars to further their cause. Isolationists influenced the debate about (white) America’s role in the globalized world. A definable ideological stratum of white Middle Americans believed that they were threatened by malevolent economic elites from above and a multicultural underclass from below. Nativism and anti-immigrant fever, once banished from the conservative dance card, were back. And a restyled white citizens’ council movement found friends inside the Republican Party.

When the millennium ended, white nationalists quietly watched the calendar pages turn, much like everybody else. They were fixated on the demographic changes to come and the birth of a more darkly complexioned United States, rather than any particular anniversary of Jesus. The September 11 terror attacks changed the immediate political environment for white nationalists. But they did not change the character of the movement itself. William Pierce’s revolutionary infrastructure grew to include a white power record business, a sophisticated propaganda operation, and a set of seasoned cadres planted from Alaska and Ohio to North Carolina. The whole apparatus relied on the remarkable mystique surrounding his leadership, however, and after he died in 2002, it
suffered a set of defections and eventually collapsed. By that time Willis Carto’s personal and political fortunes had dimmed to invisibility. The two godfathers did not themselves cross into a white republic, but they left behind a new generation of cadres slapping their boots upon the pavement and preparing for the battles to come.

On my living room wall hangs a framed twenty-four-inch reproduction from the Sarajevo Haggadah, given to me by dear friends. The Haggadah is a book of prayers, stories, and songs used by Jews at ritual meals during the Passover holiday, which remembers the ancient Hebrews’ passage from Egyptian slavery to freedom. Jews of every generation and every locale have created and re-created their own editions of this book, the Sarajevo Haggadah being one of the most beautifully illustrated. Written on bleached calfskin around 1314 in Spain, it came to the Yugo peninsula with Sephardic Jews expelled after the beginning of the Inquisition in 1492. At the end of the nineteenth century it entered the Sarajevo Museum and was saved from the grasping hands of German troops only by the clever and brave machinations of the museum’s Croatian director. It was then protected by Muslim clerics in a village mosque for the duration of World War Two. Today the Haggadah is kept in the vault of the National Bank of Sarajevo, where Bosnian Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims all regard it as one of their own national treasures.
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The Sarajevo Haggadah’s existence over the centuries and its survival during the Nazi deluge are a tragic reminder of the former Yugoslavia’s multiethnicity, and it remains a sharp contrast with the horrors that ethnic nationalist wars wreaked during the 1990s. It is useful to remember that at one time a hodgepodge of religious and ethnic groups lived together in relative harmony. Places like Sarajevo were cosmopolitan centers of learning and culture for centuries. But in a matter of a few historical seconds the whole place went up in flames, like a refugee hostel attacked by arsonists. People who had lived and worked next to one another for years found themselves with divided loyalties. Families once united by interethnic marriages mourned their dead separately. As they dismembered this multiethnic state in a sea of blood, a generation of combatants cited religious and ethnic grievances hundreds of years past, as well as complaints just weeks and months old, to justify their own nationalist politics. In the end that city’s remains stood in stark testimonial to its short steep slide from civilization to barbarism.

The United States, unlike the former Yugoslavia, has well cemented the foundations of its federal order in the 150 years since our own Civil
War, and the election of a black man, Barack Obama, has broken the white monopoly on the presidency. Nevertheless, collective identities based on race and religion have remained just under the skin of American life. As such, we will continue to be vulnerable to the machinations of the generations of white nationalists that follow Willis Carto and William Pierce, particularly as population demographics shift in the next few decades.

For those of us who hope to protect and extend our multiracial democracy, and the cosmopolitanism of the type that preserved the Sarajevo Haggadah, we ignore this white nationalist movement at our own peril. In the book that follows, dear reader, I have sought to make its history available now, so that we may not be destroyed by it in the future.

The defeat of National Socialism in Europe in World War Two was followed in the United States by a broad-based assault upon legal segregation and the white monopoly on political power. Both were broken by the the moral and political power of the black freedom movement and the judicial edicts and federal legislation that followed. While white supremacists and other segregationists staged a last stand in defense of Jim Crow, they ultimately failed. The two main characters introduced in the following pages, Willis Carto and William Pierce, received little notice during this period. But they prepare to take center stage in the years to come.

For more than fifty years, Willis Allison Carto marketed racism and anti-Semitism as if they were the solution to all the world’s ills. Yet he routinely kept himself out of the public limelight and did business behind a maze of corporate fronts. Most often, what is actually known about Willis Carto’s personal life comes largely from the mountains of court documents he created over the decades. At the same time, his role inside the white supremacist movements was well known to his compatriots there. David Duke once told a conference of Aryan believers: “There is probably no individual in this room who has had more impact on the movement today in terms of awareness of the Jewish question than this individual . . . Because he has not only influenced many of you individually . . . but he also has influenced the men and women who influenced you.”
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Born on July 17, 1926, Carto recalled a Depression-era youth of thrift and enterprise in the Midwest. He mowed lawns in the summer, shoveled snow in the winter, and made deliveries on his bicycle for the local drugstore. From the basement of his parents’ house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he made money operating a small handset printing press. Young Willis attended school in Fort Wayne. After graduating from high school in 1944, he served for two years with the army in the Philippines and Japan. Upon demobilization, he joined the ranks of veterans seeking a college education, attending both Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and the University of Cincinnati.
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