Blood and Politics (92 page)

During the first years of the twenty-first century, almost all the growth in the white nationalist world occurred inside the anti-immigrant movement. Hundreds of thousands of people contributed millions of dollars to several dozen organizations.
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And as the “racial millennium” approached, the contest over national identity and the dominance of white people promised to continue unabated and to feed the anti-immigrant movement for still another generation. The fates of Willis Carto and William Pierce, by contrast, were soon decided.

March 19, 2002.
Nine months after the final collapse of Liberty Lobby, the California home of Willis and Elisabeth Carto was sold at sheriff’s auction. The buyer, not by coincidence, was the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, doing business as the Institute for Historical Review.
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In this long mutual siege, Mark Weber prevailed at the end. The onetime acolyte of William Pierce in effect repaid the calumny that Carto had heaped upon the former physics professor during the fight over the National Youth Alliance thirty years before. Weber may not have gotten his hands on all seven and a half million dollars of the Farrel funds, but he squeezed enough out of Carto to restart the Institute for Historical Review and knock Liberty Lobby out of operation. Carto ended up much as he had started out, trying to keep the full range of his activities from reaching the scrutiny of the courts. The California bankruptcy court that handled Carto’s personal disposition was far more revealing than any of his previous legal entanglements.

After a judge declared Willis and Elisabeth Carto (along with the Furrs, Liberty Lobby, and former bagman Henri Fischer) liable for the money fraudulently conveyed to their own causes, the Cartos faced an accounting for the funds. Declaring personal bankruptcy had delayed the day of reckoning. But like the bankruptcy at Liberty Lobby, it could not put off a final judgment forever.
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In these debtors’ hearings, the details of the Carto family’s finances became a matter of record. As in proceedings past, Willis Carto was asked about the multiple pseudonyms he had used, including the infamous “E. L. Anderson,” which dated from the 1950s. Unlike those who had taken other depositions, the lawyer asking the questions had the benefit of Mark Weber’s prior knowledge, gained from the years he had
worked closely with Carto. At times during the examination, Willis Carto employed his powerful ability to forget. He did not know the whereabouts of the man who had allegedly helped hide the Farrel funds in Swiss accounts. Neither did he know the party to whom Liberty Lobby paid thousands of dollars a month in rent for its office building in D.C. On other matters, however, Carto revealed what he had to. Yes, he was treasurer of Liberty Lobby, a position he had never denied in four decades of litigation. No, he had not paid income tax in twenty years. Liberty Lobby had paid him only one dollar a year, and he received veterans and Social Security benefits. Otherwise he lived by the grace of his wife’s income. She had pulled down thirty-two thousand dollars a year as a “supervisor” at Liberty Lobby. No, he did not own a car, or any other assets for that matter. A separate nonprofit corporation owned both his car and his wife’s car. He wasn’t sure who paid the car insurance, but he didn’t. Liberty Lobby had paid for the gas, his health insurance, and a retirement plan.
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Then Willis and Elisabeth were questioned about their home in Escondido, California. It was a substantial house by any standard: three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a hillside pool on ten acres of land, a mansion in comparison to the mountainside trailer that William Pierce inhabited in West Virginia. The house was the couple’s largest and most available personal asset. Understandably, Willis and Elisabeth did not want to give it up, and so they claimed the home should be exempt from the court judgment. It was not theirs to surrender, they argued, stating that a company known as Herford Corporation, headquartered in Panama, actually owned it. Ultimately, the courts deemed otherwise. Hereford Corporation and the Cartos were essentially one and the same, the judge ruled.
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Thus Willis and Elisabeth Carto were forced out of their home, so that a sheriff’s sale could be held to satisfy the judgment.

Weber and the remaining legion-IHR staff had a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun at the expense of their former boss. They used a website to advertise the sheriff’s sale and described the house as “The Carto mansion—aka ‘Berchtesgaden West,’” using a reference to Hitler’s onetime personal mountain retreat. Perhaps his former staff had known Willis better than anyone. Along with the house and lot listing they added: “The portrait of Willis Carto, hand over heart, in front of the Nazi flag, is not included in the sale.” After paying $350,000 at the sheriff’s sale, the legion-IHR turned around and put it on the market. The asking price: $600,000.
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Losing your home in a bankruptcy sale at any age is a miserable business. Forced eviction at the age of seventy-six is tougher yet. Carto showed no signs of remorse, however, only anger at his former underlings
and an apparently sincere belief that ultimately he had been brought down through the machinations of an Israeli intelligence agency rather than by his own unwillingness to abide by the courts’ decisions after 1993.

Like a Confederate cotton trader unable to grasp the full meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Carto picked up after bankruptcy and carried on as before. He published
The Barnes Review
to replace the Institute for Historical Review. The
American Free Press
substituted for
The Spotlight
.
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Cotton was no longer king, however, and Willis Carto’s three decades of primacy in the white nationalist firmament were over. Carto had done more than any other individual to birth a movement in the post–George Wallace, post–civil rights era, and his Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
had provided much of its core infrastructure. Yet that same infrastructure had been paradoxically undercut by his constant displays of sectarian pique and his legal wars with former colleagues. Decades of litigation with a dozen different opponents had drained precious resources out of the movement, and he had destroyed as many reputations as he had helped build.

In the end Willis Carto was a merchant, in the business of selling white supremacy and anti-Semitism; his own concerns always focused on the next sale, rather than the next generation. Nevertheless, his accomplishments have continued standing after he walked off the main stage of action. He had turned the defeat of Hitler and Hitlerism into a phony revisionist history, in which Nazi gassings were a myth and the Holocaust was a hoax. He had constructed a mainstreaming tendency in the movement, jettisoning the white sheets and brown shirts. In the process he created a vernacular coded language in which white supremacy was called populism and anti-Semitism was simply anti-Zionism. More than any other individual in his time and place, he built the infrastructure and generated the resources supporting a long-standing white supremacist political movement. So it is only appropriate that in order for a white nationalist movement to grow in the future, a fellow like Willis Carto must have existed in the past.

William Luther Pierce was another story. On July 23, four months and four days after the Cartos’ house sold at the sheriff’s sale, Pierce died quietly in West Virginia.
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His illness and death at age sixty-nine were unexpected. He had enjoyed good health all his life and visited doctors for checkups only rarely. As a result, he did not notice his cancer until it was too late. Unlike the years it had taken to topple Carto, Pierce went
quickly. He had surgery in Beckley and for a brief moment thought he might have a full recovery. But it soon became evident that cancer was spreading. Faced with the prospect of a long-term disability that required daily dialysis and left him unable to work, he decided against any further treatment. He signed a will, quickly assembled a small group of his most trusted leaders, and over several days gave his last instructions from his deathbed. After his death the body was cremated.
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News of Pierce’s death drew little reaction from Willis Carto, who barely acknowledged that his old nemesis had ever lived. Carto just wondered about the future direction of National Alliance supporters. “Dr. Pierce was not an associate,” Carto told an inquirer. “I knew him many, many years ago, but I never had any sort of relationship with him. As far as his organization goes, I’m looking with great interest to see who takes it over. He was an outspoken publicist and has a lot of followers around the country.”
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David Duke, by contrast, openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Pierce. “I really think that Dr. Pierce made a tremendous contribution to our cause. He helped people think straight about the Jewish Question and the other vital realities of race. After having read almost every word he wrote, I feel once more as though a family member was lost. I have been experiencing that a great deal recently! He was one of us. I learned a great deal from him, and it is very depressing to think that his voice is stilled.”
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The New York Times
published a twenty-inch obituary above the fold, a sure sign that the former physics professor had indeed achieved a modicum of fame and notoriety. The
Times
quoted a National Alliance spokesman before any critics. Pierce was not motivated by hatred of other races, the spokesman said, but by “a love for his own people.”
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Pierce’s love apparently had trouble extending as far as his twin sons. Only one attended the memorial service in West Virginia. The other stayed away.
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And Pierce bequeathed nothing to either of them. “I declare that I am now divorced and that I have two children, namely Kelvin Pierce and Erik Pierce,” read article one of the last will and testament. That was it. The will did appoint an executor, a middle-aged, mechanically gifted comrade who had lived on the compound for years and had contributed to the improvement of its physical plant. The executor personally received all of Pierce’s trucks, tractors, and other vehicles. The rest of Pierce’s property—land, stock, copyrights, and cash—was bequeathed directly to the National Alliance.
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The pending issue at the end was not who would inherit a used car. Rather, the questions revolved around who would be named the next National Alliance chairman and whether that person would be able to
hold a large organization together through the factional rivalries that were sure to come. In the most immediate aftermath, it appeared as if all the institutions that Pierce had built might remain stable and coherent. The leaders left behind appeared in agreement over the future course of the organization and chose thirty-eight-year-old Erich Gliebe as their new chairman.
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Although Gliebe was not a rocket scientist like his predecessor, he had been the alliance’s top recruiter and ran Resistance Records as if it were a money machine. For the moment at least, he commanded the loyalty of the membership as well as those leaders who might have immediately contended for the top spot. Gliebe’s reputation as Pierce’s favorite gave him a short “honeymoon” period, when his decisions were rarely questioned and he had sense enough to lean on others. Yet holding the National Alliance together soon became impossible.

August 24, 2002.
It was the largest event of its kind in D.C. since before World War Two. One month after Pierce’s death, the National Alliance organized a demonstration in Washington, D.C. This event was ostensibly aimed at protesting government support for the state of Israel, and the marchers used the alias “Taxpayers Against Terrorism” for this occasion. The contention that they were “against terrorism” was an irony compounded by FBI testimony that counted the National Alliance as a “domestic right-wing terrorist group.”
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Terrorists or not, police three columns deep—many dark-skinned under their blue uniforms—lined Delaware Street in the nation’s capital, shielding 750 white nationalists from the taunts and chants of several hundred antiracist protesters. The antiracists dogged the parade from beginning to end. At times the conflict between the two opposing groups seemed like a replay of the dance floor battles between skinheads and punk rockers almost twenty years before.

As the white-ists paraded from the Union Station parking lot toward the Capitol’s West Lawn, they chanted in call and response: “What do we want?” the megaphones screamed. “Jews out!” the crowd answered. “When do we want it?” they continued. “Now!” was the exclamation point. Their signs amplified the message:
NO MORE INNOCENT BLOOD FOR ZIONISTS AND DIVERSITY IS GENOCIDE FOR THE WHITE RACE
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National Alliance members, under the direction of deputy membership coordinator Billy Roper, wore coats and ties and ordinary summer street clothes. They carried flags and banners emblazoned with a life rune and oak leaf wreath, the symbol most associated with their organization. Although they considered the event a memorial for William Pierce, his name was not printed on any of the placards, and Erich
Gliebe was not visible in the crowd that day. In effect, this was a “coalition” affair involving a half dozen other organizations, with each non–National Alliance group carrying its own signs.

Confederate battle flags flew. Clumps of thick-shouldered men with shaved heads and heavily inked forearms walked together, their black T-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands or with the word “Panzerfaust,” a record company competing with Gliebe’s Resistance Records. A few young women marched interspersed among the men. Small squads with swastika flags stopped and mugged for reporters’ cameras, giving stiff-armed salutes and chanting, “Sieg Heil,” with the Capitol’s dome top in the background.
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