To Julian Ross Sless-Kitain

May he and his generation continue the fight for democracy

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics

Movies and American Society

Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America

Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890

Praise for The Secret War Against Hate

“At a time of renewed interest in America’s previous fights with fascism, no one has done more than Steven J. Ross to unearth the epic conflicts and characters at the heart of that history. In The Secret War Against Hate, Ross has found a startling new chapter of our history, surfacing villains worthy of any Hollywood horror franchise, and intrepid heroes whose exploits could be written into a national anthem. This book will be taught and read for decades; the more we learn from it, the stronger we will be for the fights ahead, and for the fights already at hand. A brilliant history, a brilliant story. Bravo!”—Rachel Maddow, New York Times bestselling author of Prequel

“This richly researched, impressively annotated, burningly bright book by Ross, a historian at the University of Southern California, rewrites the history of Black and Jewish life in the decades after the Second World War . . . this book takes readers through familiar times and places with fresh research and a vivid narrative style. . . This book should be read by every American who wants to know how courageous men and women can resist hatred.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Well-researched and at times shocking . . . Ross weaves the timelines of [pro-Nazi groups and] figures together in an easy-to-follow way, showing how they gained power but also highlighting the people and organizations who actively fought against them in public and in spy rings, who each had their own motivations for resisting fascism. Readers will get sucked into the story and want to know what happens next. There are plenty of footnotes for further reading, and the author makes clear how past actions led to today’s events. This is a good read-alike and companion to Rachel Maddow’s Prequel . . . An excellent ‘hidden history’ book that gives additional context to modern political movements.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Steven Ross’s timely and impressively researched book draws a through line of the antisemitism that emerged in America in the wake of the Holocaust, continued in various iterations, and has reemerged in our day. He paints vivid portraits of the fanatics, dupes, scoundrels and bloodthirsty loonies who peopled the American fascist movements and of those who worked courageously to defeat them. This history of hate and heroic resistance to hate is chilling, inspiring, and vital reading.”—Lillian Faderman, author of Naked in the Promised Land and The Gay Revolution

“Steven Ross’s narrative about the Americans who fought to expose and defeat the neo-fascist right in the decades after World War II is highly original, full of insight, and an utterly compelling read. Anyone who wants to understand the roots of the hatemongers who befoul our politics today should read this book.”—Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

“With power and deep insight, Steven Ross has given us the harrowing story of postwar domestic fascism—dripping with racism and antisemitism—and the determined organizations and people who sought to expose its ambitions and defeat it. Eye-opening in content, The Secret War Against Hate is a must-read for anyone interested in the roots of today’s radical right and the prospects for resistance to it.”—Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Nation Under Our Feet and Illiberal America

“In his gripping new book, Steven J. Ross unflinchingly examines American Hitlerism and efforts to expose it. Recent events bring home tragically the pertinence of Ross’s instructive narrative.”—Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

“In this revelatory study, Steven Ross brings out of the shadows a series of far-right agitators who have remained largely unknown to both professional scholars and the general public. He convincingly reveals that a fascist tradition has always existed in the United States, while compellingly showing how ordinary Americans have worked to counteract it. Combining original research and sober analysis, the book could not be more timely.”—Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, author of The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present

“Set against the backdrop of postwar America, Steven Ross’s meticulously researched and engaging narrative illuminates the increasingly pernicious development of White Supremacy and rightwing extremism, and those few organizations and individuals who worked to limit the impact of illiberal forces. He outlines, like few before him, the precedents that frame many of the present-day debates on whether the U.S. should remain an inclusive democracy or revert to an atavistic society that limits opportunities for those outside the majority. Despite heroic efforts by civil society to keep these forces at bay after 1945, Ross notes rightly that extremist leaders might pass, ‘but ideas persist forever.’ Understanding the origins of today’s extremisms, the approaches that proved successful in resisting them, and how this past shapes our future make The Secret War Against Hate an indispensable and important contribution to the field.”—Robert J. Williams, CEO and Finci-Viterbi Chair of the USC Shoah Foundation and UNESCO Chair on Antisemitism and Holocaust Research

Praise for Hitler in Los Angeles

“A terrifying, revelatory and inspiring masterpiece that probes the flourishing fascism of 1930s America, and the power of popular resistance to combat an alliance of Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan and other homegrown paramilitary groups.”—Jury for Pulitzer Prize in History

“A remarkable tale, one that pits a secretive, chess-playing Jewish spymaster—attorney Leon Lewis—and a group of courageous German American war veterans that he recruited as his spies against a cast of villains straight out of a classic Warner Bros. film . . . Mr. Ross has a novelist’s eye for characters and detail.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Hitler in Los Angeles . . . is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding.”—Los Angeles Times

CONTENTS

Guide to Major Spymasters, Spies, Nazis, and White Supremacists

Introduction: The Good War, the Greatest Generation, and the Betrayed Generation

I. AMERICAN PATRIOTS AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

1. Returning from War, Returning to War

2. Spying on the Ku Klux Klan

3. The Munich of America

4. Let the Violence Begin

5. Bringing Down the Columbians

6. Death and Deportation

II. NAZIS IN NEW YORK

7. “Kill the Jews, Save the White Race”

8. Getting Inside the International Fascist Front

9. Exposed!

III. NEW ALLIANCES AND THE AGE OF TERROR

10. Black Monday and the Forging of a New American Fascist Front

11. Bombs, Synagogues, Churches, and the Age of Terror

12. The Most Media-Savvy Nazi in America

13. Street Actions: The Battle for White Castle, the March on Washington, and Bombs in Birmingham

IV. MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN

14. Jewish Nazis, Dead Nazis, and the End of George Lincoln Rockwell

15. Jesse Stoner, White Power, and the New Betrayed Generation

16. The End of Spying

17. The Last Godfather of White Supremacy

Epilogue: We’ve Always Been Here

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

A Note on the Author

GUIDE TO MAJOR SPYMASTERS, SPIES, NAZIS, AND WHITE SUPREMICISTS

Major Spymasters |
Anti-Defamation League: | Arnold Forster
American Jewish Committee: | George Mintzer
| Abraham Shoenfeld
| George Kellman
Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League: | James H. Sheldon
Major Spies |
Anti-Defamation League: | Stetson Kennedy (aka John S. Perkins)*
American Jewish Committee: | “Reporter A” “Reporter B,” “Reporter BBB,”
| “Reporter GEC,” “Reporter W”
Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League: | Stetson Kennedy (aka John S. Perkins)
| William Bishop (aka John Brown)
| Mario Buzzi (aka Gino Falco)
| Renee Fruchtbaum (aka Renee Forrest)
| Joe Rudden (aka John J. Rich)
| Lanier Waller
| Emmanuel Trujillo (aka Mana Truhill)
| Irene Dovale (aka Ruth Ross)
| Larry Sestito
| William “Butch” Goring
Major Nazis
Columbians | Emory Burke
| Homer Leslie Loomis Jr.
National Renaissance Party | James H. Madole
| Matthew Koehl
| John Patler
| Daniel Burros
American Nazi Party | George Lincoln Rockwell
| Matthew Koehl
| John Patler
| Daniel Burros
Major White Supremacists
Stoner Anti-Jewish Party and | Jesse Benjamin Stoner
Christian Anti-Jewish Party
National States Rights Party | Jesse Benjamin Stoner
| Edward Reed Fields
| Connie Lynch

aka refers to their undercover name

INTRODUCTION

The Good War, the Greatest Generation, and the Betrayed Generation

“We Will Finish the Job Hitler Began”

—JESSE B. STONER, 1947

“The Jews Will Not Replace Us”

—CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA 2017

“Camp Auschwitz” “6MWE”*

—SWEATSHIRTS SEEN AT THE U.S. CAPITOL, JANUARY 6, 2021

On January 6, 2021, Americans were shocked as they witnessed thousands of self-proclaimed patriots storm the Capitol, many carrying Confederate flags and wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with antisemitic messages. President Donald Trump helped promote the climate of hate and discord, but he was not solely to blame for the riots, nor did hate end after he left office two weeks later. What the nation witnessed that cold winter afternoon was the continuation of a battle that started in 1945, when Americans began fighting a second civil war over two distinct visions of the future. The second civil war was not a regional battle between North and South, slave and free, but a national one between White Supremacists and their opponents. Groups such as the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and associated militias that stormed the Capitol are part of a much longer tradition of self-fashioned Christian patriots determined since the end of World War II to protect the Constitution from what they believe are the perversions of liberals and leftists.

From the mid-1940s to the present, American hate groups have openly called for death to Jews and Blacks. Successive efforts to terrorize and murder people of different religious, racial, or sexual orientations continued through the killing of nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that took eleven lives in 2018, the 2019 attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California, and the continued murder of Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, Latinos, Asians, gays, immigrants, and anyone deemed “nonwhite” by a variety of White Supremacists.¹

Hitler lost the war in Europe, but many Americans have been willing to fight for his ideas on our soil from 1945 until today.

I was born Steven Joseph Rosenwaks on May 8, 1949, precisely four years after Victory in Europe (VE) Day, to parents who could not believe their good fortune. My father spent the early years of the war in the Warsaw Ghetto and then, after it fell in May 1943, in Treblinka and Dachau concentration camps. My mother was raised near Lodz, Poland, and remained there until she was sent to Auschwitz in August 1944, then to Bergen-Belsen, and finally to a slave labor munitions camp in Salzwedel, Germany. They met in Munich after the war, married, and settled in New York, where my father pursued the trade he learned at Dachau: baking—a skill he used to supply Zabar’s and Balducci’s with their strudels and Russian coffee cake for over thirty years.

Sometime before my third birthday, my father and mother changed our family name to Ross. When I asked them why, they said that people were constantly mispronouncing or misspelling their name, so they picked a much simpler one. It was only when I reached my twenties that my mother told me the real reason they changed their name: if there was ever a Holocaust or pogrom in the United States, they felt their children would be safer with the name Ross than Rosenwaks.

I always thought my parents were being paranoid. I do not think that anymore.

Like so many Americans today, I believed that the end of World War II brought a decrease in hate and a new era of tolerance in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth. Antisemitism and racism went up—not down—after Pearl Harbor and again after the war’s end. Right-wing isolationist groups of the 1930s that had pledged to terrorize Jews if they succeeded in getting us into the war followed through on their threats during and after the war. In 1940, the Anti-Defamation League was tracking 60 organized hate groups; that total rose to 112 in 1945 and 130 in 1946.2 Public opinion polls taken in 1945 reveal that 25 percent of Americans were “infected with anti-Semitism,” 25 percent were opposed to antisemitism, and 50 percent had “no fixed opinions and can be swung to either” side. No pollster asked if someone was a racist, but when queried in 1945 whether they would favor a law requiring employers to hire a person qualified for a job regardless of race, 43 percent of Americans said yes, 44 percent said no, and 13 percent had no opinion.³

Perhaps most shocking of all was a 1943 poll in which “90 percent of the American people stated that they would rather loose [sic] the war than give full equality to the American Negroes.”⁴

These grim statistics, combined with deadly outbreaks of racial and antisemitic violence during the 1940s and ’50s, require us to reconsider the legacy of what newscaster and author Tom Brokaw referred to as the “Good War” and the “Greatest Generation.” We also need to consider the legacy of another lesser-known cohort that emerged from World War II: the “Betrayed Generation,” as I call them, who returned from war with a radically different vision of the American future.⁵

To understand the roots of January 6, 2021, and to address issues that continue to divide the United States, we need to understand the worldview of both sides. Those who many may think of today as “bad guys” never thought of themselves that way; nor did they think White Supremacy was a bad thing. From their point of view, they were the greatest generation. They were patriots who would save the nation from the liberal “bad guys” who envisioned a postwar world in which Blacks, Jews, and minorities could live together as equals—a world that they believed ignored or diminished the achievements of white Western Christianity.

As soon as World War II ended, a new battle began on American soil. Men and women came back from war deeply divided over its legacy. Many veterans returned home profoundly changed by the close relationships they had forged with men in their platoon, men of different religions, ethnicities, regions, classes, and races. Long-standing prejudices slowly dissipated as they came to see “others”—Jews, Blacks, Catholics, Asians, Latinos—as sharing the same basic values, even if some of those “others” had fought in segregated units. They returned home with a greater sense of why defeating Hitler had been so important to democracy and to the nation’s future. They may not have loved their minority brethren, but they now believed in their right to live without fear of violence or death. These were the men and women whom Tom Brokaw hailed as the Greatest Generation.

Returning Black and Jewish veterans expected the discrimination they had experienced before and during World War II would now be “a thing of the past.” Having “shed their blood” and “made a major contribution to the war effort,” observed one Anti-Defamation League leader, “they decided the time had passed when they would quietly accept second-class citizenship.” They were Americans and demanded to be treated as such. Of the nearly 5 million Jews in the United States, 600,000 fought in World War II. Likewise, more than 1.2 million African Americans served in the military, including thousands of Black women in special women’s auxiliaries. Black veterans, observed Atlanta’s representative to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “had been changed markedly by their war experiences and were no longer content to slip back into their former subservient roles.” They, too, belonged to Brokaw’s Greatest Generation.⁶

There was also a darker side to the war’s end. Many Americans had gone to war not because they hated Hitler and Nazism but simply because Japan had attacked the United States. They did not like Jews and Blacks before the war and they did not like serving with them during the war—even if Black soldiers were kept in segregated units. These veterans had been raised in a climate of segregation, racism, and antisemitism, and they returned from war determined to maintain the world they had left behind.

These members of the Betrayed Generation considered themselves American patriots who had been double-crossed by politicians. A new, more democratic postwar order had arisen in their absence that set out to curb the racist ways of the past. Union organizing campaigns aimed at including Black workers and wartime measures such as the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) threatened to undermine decades of Jim Crow workplace segregation by banning discriminatory employment practices by federal agencies, unions, and companies engaged in federally funded war work. The FEPC and wartime labor shortages led to two million Blacks being employed in defense plants nationwide and 200,000 in federal civil service jobs. Likewise, Congress’s 1949 fair housing practices act made it easier for Blacks to compete with white families for affordable housing.⁷

Returning from a foreign war, thousands of self-proclaimed patriots vowed to fight a domestic war to protect their country and beloved Constitution from what they saw as unnatural policies advocated by liberals, Jews, Blacks, and minorities who were mobilizing to strike down Jim Crow. They rejected the idea of a postwar world where Blacks and Jews lived in their neighborhoods and attended the same schools as their children. Nor did White Supremacists consider Jews “white.” Racists excluded them and their Black counterparts from the American Dream. The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that. It was not just Southerners who felt this way. Men and women in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and urban centers around the country joined groups that articulated similar points of view.

Many of the Betrayed Generation were veterans who returned home more dangerous than before. They had killed during the war and were willing to kill again during the peace. Marine veteran Lanier Waller told how ever since childhood he had been “taught that if a man was black, he was to obey me” or “have the hell beat out of him.” The idea that Blacks or Jews were now equals simply did not fit with this long-standing way of life.⁸

Waller and veterans like him were “perfect bait,” as he later confessed, for “Fascist demagogues” such as Emory Burke, Jesse B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell who called on fellow “patriots” to finish the job Hitler had begun: kill the Jews and send Blacks to Africa. These leaders and their supporters, like their counterparts today, saw themselves as patriots who were killing to save America. Most far-right hate groups called themselves “nationalists,” a term used to encapsulate an ideology of American patriotism based upon racism and antisemitism—an ideology that excluded non-Aryans, non-Anglo-Saxons, and non-Christians from American democracy. Only when they succeeded in ridding the country of Blacks and Jews would America be great again.

The Secret War Against Hate tells two interlocking stories. It is the story of the growth of far-right extremism between 1945 and the 1980s as seen through the lens of four of the most important “godfathers” of postwar White Supremacy. And it is the story of the three New York–based antifascist groups that secretly fought to stop them. On one side stood Burke, Stoner, Madole, and Rockwell, who dedicated their lives to protecting the white Christian world they had known before the war against all who would now degrade and destroy it. As millions of veterans returned home in 1945–46, these charismatic leaders built violent networks of terror and planned deadly attacks on Jews and Blacks throughout the nation; and their successors in militias and antigovernment groups have continued doing so ever since. These four men and their organizations articulated ideas that motivated many of the people who stormed the Capitol in January 2021.

What distinguished these four grassroots leaders from other nationalists is that despite repeated setbacks, they worked together for over four decades creating their own groups, grooming a new generation of captains and lieutenants, and traveling the country to build White Supremacist organizations in cities, towns, and rural outposts. They were not unsophisticated bigots, but men who grew savvier and more dangerous over time. Burke, Stoner, Madole, and Rockwell never admitted defeat; they learned from their failures, got smarter, and continued their battles in new organizations. The moment one hate group was stopped, they joined or formed another to fight under a new name but with the same goals. If achieving those goals meant murdering their enemies in their homes, businesses, or places of worship, so be it.

The multiple organizations they formed became greenhouses for nurturing far-right men and women who continued the struggle long after their deaths. Although they never achieved their dream of creating a united fascist front that could challenge Democrats and Republicans for high office, the subsequent leaders and followers of the Betrayed Generation set a deadly agenda of hate and prejudice that lasted well into the twenty-first century. From 1942 until his death in 2005, Jesse Benjamin Stoner waged a relentless war on behalf of White Supremacy. He and his allies justified their lifelong loathing of Jews by embracing Christian Identity, a religious ideology tinged with antigovernment sentiments that would be used by groups such as the Aryan Nations, Proud Boys, White Aryan Resistance, and Sovereign Citizens well into the 2020s. Along with American Nazi Party leader George Rockwell, the two men were hailed by those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the godfathers of White Supremacy.

Opposing these four men and their deadly organizations were three New York–based groups that waged a secret war to defeat organized White Supremacists: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League (ANL). Many Americans have wondered why Jews did not fight back against Nazis and fascists. They did. They just did not always publicize their secret activities. Not trusting local, state, or federal authorities to protect Jews from harm, all three organizations began spying on domestic Nazis, Klansmen, and fascists in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As hate rose after World War II, so too did the need for even more spying—or “self-defense” operations as they called it. From 1945 until the 1980s, and sometimes beyond, Arnold Forster (ADL), George Mintzer (AJC), and James Sheldon (ANL) sent dozens of undercover agents to various parts of the nation with a single mission: join hate groups, rise to positions of leadership, and gather documents that could be turned over to authorities and used to put those groups out of business.

Forster, Mintzer, and Sheldon realized theirs was a long-term mission, for they knew that hate ran deep in the American DNA. There would be no quick victory against prejudice. Like Burke, Stoner, Madole, and Rockwell, they were prepared to wage a lifelong struggle to protect Jews and Blacks from those who threatened to do them harm.

Did these four hate group leaders and their allies really pose a serious threat to Americans? Were their calls for death to their enemies more than just empty rhetoric? Blacks and Jews certainly thought so. Killing people is not the only way to measure the impact of hate. Although their numbers may have been small, White Supremacists—past and present—succeeded in creating a climate of fear that has diminished the quality of life for Blacks, Jews, and minorities of color. From 1945 until today, many Americans have lived in constant fear of being beaten, harassed, or killed because of their race or religion. Jews today are afraid of wearing a yarmulke or Star of David in certain neighborhoods, while Black parents instruct their children to be very careful when stopped by police. And both groups no longer feel safe in their respective houses of worship. Nonminorities who never lived with these daily threats cannot fully understand how fear—or simply the threat of violence—is an assault on the basic American promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What was at stake in these undercover operations was nothing less than an existential battle for the soul of America. Would we be a white-ruled Christian nation filled with loathing toward minorities, or would we be an inclusive multiracial society based upon the principle of justice and democracy for all? Despite nostalgic ideas about the Good War, in 1945 the answer was not clear, for both sides had roughly the same number of committed defenders.

This is the story of those often-secret battles and the men and women who fought them. To understand how both sides saw the world, I tell their stories in real time and from the point of view of hate group leaders, the spymasters who plotted their demise, and the undercover agents who risked their lives to protect all Americans regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity. I use actual dialogue drawn from hundreds of previously unknown or underutilized spy reports.

These undercover accounts contain dialogue drawn directly from the mouths of the people they were tailing. Those words were often harsh—in fact, more than harsh. They were daily assaults meant to dehumanize their enemies.

I have used that language sparingly, but not the men I write about. If the modern reader feels repulsed and upset by words on a page, especially the N-word, imagine the sense of fear felt by Black or Jewish men and women on the receiving end of those verbal assaults. From 1945 until today, many Americans have believed it is permissible to cross the lines of human decency and threaten other human beings simply because of their religion or race. That is why it is important to keep some of these words, when said in their original context, alive for the modern reader. I also use the terms Blacks and whites, which is the way people of the time spoke, as opposed to current parlance of Black people and white people.

This is the story of American hate and American resistance to hate. It is a story worth telling over and over again—especially at this moment in time.

“6MWE” is shorthand for Six Million Wasn’t Enough—referring to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

PART I

AMERICAN PATRIOTS AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

1.

Returning from War, Returning to War

The second American Civil War began on the evening of October 20, 1945. As millions of veterans came back from World War II, Ku Klux Klan leaders sounded a battle cry to preserve their beloved white Protestant nation from its many enemies. “White Supremacy is threatened,” fifty-five-year-old obstetrician and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Samuel Green warned Atlanta’s returning warriors. “America is calling every White Man, who has red blood, into the fight.” That balmy October night, Green, who proudly sported a Hitler-style mustache, renewed the fight for racial purity by holding the region’s first major cross burning since Pearl Harbor. Patriotic Klansmen had halted cross burning during war, Green explained, because it was necessary “that all factions unite to win the war.”¹

Klansmen signaled the start of a new domestic war by lighting a gigantic fiery cross that stretched 300 yards across the top of Stone Mountain and could be seen sixty miles away. To ensure that no disruptions would occur, Green asked Atlanta policeman and loyal Klan enforcer John “Itchy Trigger Finger” Nash and his fellow Klansmen/cops to guide traffic and preserve order. Three hundred men—many wearing U.S. Army uniforms—paid their ten-dollar initiation fee and took the Klan oath to uphold “the tenets of the Christian religion, the maintenance of White Supremacy and the principles of true Americanism.” Witnessing the ceremony were 3,000 men and women who had driven from nearby states to celebrate the Klan’s revival.²

Also observing the evening’s events was Southern journalist Stetson Kennedy. The previous day, while posing as a sympathetic Klansman, he had interviewed Samuel Green, who had spoken effusively about the coming gathering. Despite being shut down by the federal government in 1944 for failure to pay back taxes, Green told Kennedy, the “Klan has never been dead—and the Klan is never going to die.” Now that victory had been achieved, men returning from the army “feel that many of their rights and benefits have been taken away from them and they want them back.” A liberal Congress, unduly influenced by communists, had betrayed Southern patriots by passing wartime legislation that gave too much power to Blacks and Jews. Southerners would now take back their region and their country. “I’ll tell you this,” Green vowed, “no CIO or AFL carpetbagging organizers, or any other damned Yankees are going to come into the South and tell Southerners how to run either their businesses or their niggahs.”³

The Klan leader boasted that Klan membership in Georgia had quickly reached 25,000 and was growing each week since war’s end. By December, the Klan revival had spread far beyond the South. Los Angeles Klan leader Ray Schneider told local members he had received orders from Atlanta headquarters to resume full activities after VE Day. Revitalized Klan chapters (called Klaverns) were soon operating in twenty states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and California.⁴

The events at Stone Mountain confirmed Kennedy’s worst fears. Men who had gone to war and learned to kill now returned home ready to wage an equally deadly war. Whether fighting in Europe or the Pacific, they had learned that using violence against an enemy in defense of their nation was acceptable and laudable. They would now do the same on the home front. “I had hoped that the spread of public school education, and the experiences of World War II,” Kennedy explained, “would make my own generation less susceptible to the appeals of Ku Kluxery than were their fathers and grandfathers before them.” But that was not the case. The Klan was getting stronger and more dangerous as it attracted thousands of trained military veterans determined to preserve the world in which they had been raised.⁵

Born at the wrong time and wrong place to an old aristocratic southern family in Jacksonville, Florida, in October 1916, William Stetson Kennedy—known as Stetson—grew up in a racist family living in one of the most racist areas of the South and yet he emerged as a liberal anti-racist. His family claimed ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence, served as high-ranking officers in the Confederate army, and held senior leadership positions in the Ku Klux Klan. His own views on race were cemented as a young boy when the family’s beloved Black maid Flo, whom he considered a second mother, was brutally beaten and raped by Klansmen for suggesting a white bus driver gave her the wrong change. The viciousness of the bloody attack, Kennedy recounted, was “enough to turn me against the Klan forever.”⁶

Hoping to escape the world of hate, Kennedy pursued an unusual education for his time, attending the University of Florida, the progressive New School for Social Research in New York, and the Sorbonne in Paris. An ardent New Dealer and antifascist, he returned home to work for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project from 1937 to 1942, where he improved his craft working alongside like-minded people such as folklorist Alan Lomax and young Black writer Zora Neale Hurston. The aspiring journalist’s first book, Palmetto Country (1942), exposed the lies the Klan told about the post–Civil War South—lies that had been dramatized by director D. W. Griffith in his 1915 film Birth of a Nation. “The Negro Freedmen, the poor white Southerners, and the inspired Northerners who came down to assist in the Reconstruction,” Kennedy told readers, “were actually laying the foundations of a real democracy when the big planters launched the KKK to break it up.” The South “may have lost the war on the battlefields,” Kennedy concluded, “but she has been allowed to retain much of her institution of slavery.”⁷

Not surprisingly, Palmetto Country proved unpopular among Southern newspaper editors, who denounced Kennedy as the “renegade scion of a respected Southern family” and “a traitor to his region and his race.” Worse yet, “I was literally drummed out of the family circle,” Kennedy recounted, and “economic sanctions were imposed against me, so that it was difficult for me to find or hold a job.”⁸

Over the next several years, Kennedy’s commitment to integration and racial justice led to jobs working for the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee and writing for progressive publications such PM, New Masses, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP)’s Crisis magazine. Rejected from military service because of a bad back, Kennedy decided to fight his own war against “racist terrorists in our back yard.” All his friends were in the service, he explained, “and they were being shot at in a big way,” so the “prospect that this might also happen to me if I crossed swords with the Klan did not seem a sufficient reason to hold back.”⁹

As the conflict in Europe and Asia came to an end, Kennedy knew the Ku Klux Klan posed a dangerous threat to Jews, Blacks, and minorities. Founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December 1865, the Klan never accepted the outcome of the Civil War. Its members continued fighting to keep Southern Blacks in a condition of neo-slavery. After being suppressed by federal authorities in the 1870s, the Klan experienced a revival following the premiere of The Birth of a Nation, a racist retelling of the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction in which Klansmen were the heroes.

The men and women joining the revived Klan were hardly the “dregs” of society. Professional and middle-class Southerners, Midwesterners, and West Coast residents joined together to thwart the full impact of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. They were equally determined to ensure that Jews and Catholics remained on the margins of society, deferring to their Protestant white superiors. By 1926, Klan membership swelled to an estimated five million men and women. As far as Klansmen were concerned, the War for Southern Independence (their term for the Civil War) was still being waged. But unlike the first Civil War, there was no Mason–Dixon line separating the two sides. This second Civil War was a borderless one fought by White Supremacists throughout the country—north, south, east, and west.¹⁰

Atlanta was the center of the Klan in 1915 and remained its center in 1945 and for years thereafter. The “Imperial City of the KKK’s Invisible Empire,” as it was known, was both the longtime center of racism and antisemitism and a beacon of hope and tolerance for the postwar New South. In 1906, its Black population suffered through race riots that left as many as 100 Black Atlantans dead. Nine years later, the city’s Jews watched factory superintendent Leo Frank lynched for a murder he did not commit. During the 1920s and ’30s, the Klan located its national headquarters on fashionable Peachtree Street and set out to rebuild their movement. On the evening of October 20, 1945, they embarked on a new campaign to save their Christian nation from the degradations caused by Jews and Blacks.

As he watched the cross burning atop Stone Mountain, Stetson Kennedy worried that a new race war was brewing, a national war that would, as it had in 1861, pit American against American. The Southern journalist would do all he could to stop that from happening.

Kennedy began his war against hate in September 1944, by moving to Atlanta. He traveled there knowing the Klan was in the midst of a war of survival. The first blow to the Invisible Empire had come that year when the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 [$12.5 million in 2024 dollars] that had forced the bankrupt national organization to dissolve. The dissolution was only temporary. Grand Dragon Samuel Green simply chartered a new group in 1944 that had a different name, the Association of Georgia Klans, but the same goal: to keep Blacks, Jews, and minorities in their place. When Georgia authorities announced their intention to dissolve Green’s new group, Kennedy decided to travel there and fight any Klan revival. From 1944 until 1948, the intrepid Southerner led two lives: Stetson Kennedy, the crusading journalist who reported on Southern racial tensions, and John S. Perkins, proud Klansman and undercover spy. He hoped to gather hard evidence that would help authorities bring down the Klan, while also serving as material for articles and books he planned to publish as Stetson Kennedy.¹¹

Upon arriving in Atlanta, Kennedy joined the Klan and nineteen other White Supremacist groups under the assumed name John Perkins, fictional nephew of his actual uncle Brady Perkins, a former KKK Grand Titan from Jacksonville. Since his uncle was dead, Klansmen would have a hard time discovering there was no nephew named John Perkins. Knowing Klansmen were bound to wonder how he made a living, Kennedy secured a position as a reporter and salesman for the highly racist periodical Southern Outlook. He could impress his new Klan friends by writing articles that portrayed them in a favorable light.

As he traveled from Florida to Atlanta, leaving his wife and two children behind because of the danger, Kennedy stopped off to visit former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, a longtime friend of his uncle Brady Perkins. Introducing himself as Perkins’s nephew and newly appointed salesman for the Southern Outlook, Kennedy received a warm greeting from Talmadge, who encouraged “John” to join the Klan’s campaign to preserve White Supremacy. Kennedy promised he would. The visit was strategic: having Talmadge vouch for him would increase Kennedy’s respectability among Klansmen and deflect possible suspicion of his motives for joining the Invisible Empire.

Kennedy began attending weekly Klan meetings. After each gathering, he went home and wrote up reports of who had attended, what had been said, and what threats loomed ahead. After learning that their new recruit was the nephew of former Klan leader Brady Perkins and knew the much-admired Talmadge, members of Nathan Bedford Klavern No. 1, the most powerful and dangerous Klavern in Georgia, suspended their usual background check and welcomed him into their ranks. Kennedy swore an oath that he was “a native-born, true and loyal citizen of the United States, being a white male Gentile person of temperate habits, sound of mind and a believer in the tenets of the Christian religion, the maintenance of white supremacy and the principles of a pure Americanism.” He was now one of them.¹²

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Stetson Kennedy in Klan robe (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

After he had attended Monday meetings for many months, Kennedy/Perkins’s fellow Klansmen invited their affable new member to join the exclusive ranks of the Klavalier Klub, the Klan’s military wing tasked with beating, raping, or murdering anyone who challenged the group. Atlanta’s Klavaliers, according to Georgia Assistant Attorney General Daniel Duke, “numbered about fifty and were picked for their brawn and willingness to go out on terroristic raids.” To ensure their success, Klavaliers carried an assortment of “pistols, switch-blade ‘nigger-killer’ knives, blackjacks, brassknucks, and a flogging whip made by sewing a piece of sawmill belt to the collection.”¹³

Standing five feet, nine inches, with blue eyes and blond hair and weighing a slight 114 pounds, Stetson Kennedy was hardly an imposing figure—and that worked to his great advantage. No one suspected that their “frail” recruit with a “very high forehead” was a spy. Yet, the Southern liberal was playing a dangerous game. Every Klansman knew the penalty for betraying their secrets was “Death, death, at the hands of a Brother!” The fate of a Klavalier Klub spy would be even worse: torture before death. When Grand Dragon Green realized someone was sending Klan secrets to northern newspaper columnists, he offered a “thousand dollars for the traitor’s ass.” That someone was Kennedy. Taking no chances, he began sleeping with a .32 automatic under his pillow.¹⁴

Even the most courageous journalist needs to earn a living. Realizing he could do good while supplementing his scant income, Kennedy visited the local Anti-Defamation League office and offered to share information about the Klan—for a fee. Fortunately, he approached them just as they, along with the American Jewish Committee and Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, decided to extend their secret war against hate to fight the postwar forces that threatened Jews and Blacks in the South and throughout the nation. Kennedy would be their first and most important Southern spy.

2.

Spying on the Ku Klux Klan

The persistence of hate following the end of the war—hate wrapped in the appealing guise of patriotism, hate that called for violence against minorities in the name of God and country—was precisely what Jewish and Black leaders had worried about for years. They knew that American entry into the war in December 1941 had not stopped racism or antisemitism; it had just driven its practitioners underground. Fortunately, three New York–based antifascist groups had anticipated such a dark postwar turn and were ready to stop it before any Black or Jew was murdered.

In May 1945, just days before the end of the European conflict, Arnold Forster, George Mintzer, and James Sheldon sat, respectively, in the New York City offices of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League (ANL) planning strategies to combat a “resurgence of organized hatred.” They knew antsemitism had plagued the Western world for over 2,000 years and was unlikely to end soon. All three men swore there would be no Holocaust or racist purge on American soil while they lived; each committed his life to creating a postwar world where Blacks and Jews could live free of fear.¹

Despite their hopes, Forster, Mintzer, and Sheldon anticipated a postwar nation filled with hate rather than brotherhood. Their fears were confirmed by undercover operative John Roy Carlson, who had been spying for the ADL and AJC since 1939. “Many Americans who truly love their country,” he would observe in 1946, “are innocently drawn within the orbit of those who under the guise of ‘Christianity,’ ‘nationalism,’ and ‘America First’ incite hate and disunity and wish to ‘preserve the Constitution’ by methods identical with Hitler … Hitlerism in our country is a sinister and expanding reality.”²

Carlson’s concerns were shared by Forster and Mintzer. “When the overseas conflict ends,” they warned in early May 1945, “we face an internal war—unless racial and religious tensions are removed.” To stop that from happening, the two men expanded spy operations begun before the war to include sizeable networks of volunteers and paid operatives in dozens of cities and towns throughout the United States. Their mission: “to expose and destroy anti-democratic forces in America” and “to bind all peoples of our country into a community which honors and upholds human rights and equality.” They did that by keeping close tabs on antisemites, fascists, and White Supremacists. They attended their meetings, submitted reports of what was said, and alerted ADL or AJC leaders to possible violence. Like U.S. Assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge, they knew that “fascism is not dead in the United States; it is merely reconverting.”³

Sitting in his office at Forty-Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue, just blocks away from Forster and Mintzer, James H. Sheldon, head of the ANL, had been plotting far more dangerous undercover operations than the ADL or AJC. Founded in 1933 by Jewish lawyer Samuel Untermyer, financed largely by New York Jews, and aggressively supported by New York’s half-Jewish Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the ANL initially called for an international boycott of German products until Hitler stopped persecuting Jews and all other minorities. In 1941, shortly after Untermyer’s death, thirty-four-year-old Methodist civil rights activist Sheldon moved to New York City to direct the ANL and oversee its undercover operations. “Since my Army medical status was 4F, I felt that this was the most direct way in which I could make my contribution to the war effort,” he later recalled.⁴

None of the three leaders or their organizations saw themselves as vigilantes. They did not seek vengeance, nor did they resort to violence. Rather, they wanted to expose enemies and bring them to justice lawfully. All three groups referred to their undercover activities as “fact finding,” “investigative work,” “self-defense,” or “civic defense work.” Self-defense, explained one ADL supporter, meant being able to “conduct your business, send your children to college,” to vote, worship, and live without fear “in a healthy atmosphere.” And this held true for all Americans, not just Jews. “Law enforcement authorities,” Sheldon explained, “have the first responsibility for dealing with these extremists.” But, he added, “those officials are not doing their duty as long as the leaders of these groups stay out of jail.”⁵

From the late 1930s onward, all three organizations defended their undercover operations by arguing that when a government failed to protect the lives of its citizens, it was incumbent upon citizens to protect themselves. “Jews of the United States,” insisted one AJC leader in January 1938, “have a right to defend themselves by every lawful means against the attacks of anti-Semites who threaten their welfare, safety and very existence; and … this right is consistent with the principles of our democratic form of government.” The ADL’s Arnold Forster defended their spy operations, explaining, “The dangers to Jews was so great … Our very lives were possibly at stake.”⁶

Stetson Kennedy was one in a long line of secret agents. Knowing they could not rely upon government authorities for help, the ADL, AJC, and ANL recruited a small cadre of paid undercover agents along with dozens of local members throughout the country to monitor hate groups and send reports to national headquarters about plans to harm Blacks as well as Jews. The “special” postwar Jewish–Black relationship, forged during the 1930s when both lived in urban ghettos and often made common cause against powerful elites, was not borne solely of altruism, but of an understanding that a threat to one minority was a threat to all. ADL national director Benjamin Epstein, explained his son, was determined “to fight the wrongs he saw. Antisemitism and anti-Black prejudice were what he saw as needing to be righted. After all, it was the Anti-Defamation League, not the Anti-Semitic League.” Like his counterparts at the AJC and ANL, Epstein understood that if White Supremacists were allowed to terrorize and murder Blacks, then Jews would be next.⁷

Black leaders like A. Philip Randolph were equally adamant in supporting a special Black–Jewish alliance as mutually beneficial. Insisting that Black antisemitism was “dangerous and downright stupid,” he noted how in their long-standing battles against Jim Crow, Jews had “rallied to our support. And not just with words.” In 1944, mixed-race civil rights activist Arthur Huff Fauset warned that “if Fascism makes any headway in America, it will strike out at Jew and Negro alike.” The two minority groups needed each other.⁸

Convinced they could not trust local, state, or federal authorities to protect Jews or Blacks from harm, all three organizations had begun spying on hate groups long before the war. During the 1930s and ’40s, police and sheriff departments in the South, on both coasts, and everywhere in between were filled with men who sympathized with or belonged to far-right groups such as the fascist Silver Shirts, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazi-dominated German-American Bund. Even after the war, observed one ADL leader, police in New Yor k City “had themselves become infected with the virulent Nazi bug.” It was “not the American Nazis who were prone to be arrested or beaten up [at Nazi-run street meetings] but the Jewish volunteers who were acting only as observers.”⁹

Nor could Jews and Blacks rely on the FBI for protection. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover displayed little concern for the growth of American Nazi and fascist organizations. He focused his resources on investigating alleged communists. Despite the Los Angeles bureau pleading with Hoover in 1940 to put Hermann Schwinn, the nation’s number two Nazi, under surveillance, Hoover refused. Schwinn had broken no federal law, the FBI chief responded, and therefore could not be surveilled. He had, however, ordered his agents to tail alleged Hollywood communists and left-wing activists such as Charlie Chaplin and Upton Sinclair even though they had broken no laws.¹⁰

Congress proved equally unreliable in protecting Jews and Blacks. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), founded in 1934 by Jewish congressman Samuel Dickstein with the intent of investigating Nazi and fascist activities, spent 75 percent of its initial reports focusing on alleged communist threats while minimizing the danger of fascism. Little changed after the war as HUAC continued to denounce left-wing communists—their code phrase for “Jews”—as the greatest threat to American democracy and Christianity. As Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo reminded voters, Jews had “denied and crucified Christ.” During his investigation of domestic extremism in 1946, Congressman John Rankin, a Democrat from Mississippi, framed the hearings as a battle of “Yiddish communism versus Christian civilization.” He refused to call the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon to testify on the grounds that the Klan “is an old American institution” and “our job is to investigate foreign issues and alien organizations.”¹¹

In May 1946, HUAC voted 5 to 1 not to investigate Klan activities. As for the dangers posed by neo-Nazis and “nationalist” groups, a special postwar HUAC Sub-Committee on Fascism held only one fifteen-minute session, after which they declared “there is no fascist threat in America.” But Rankin did ask the committee to investigate the Anti-Defamation League, which he called the “Gestapo for the Bnai Brith” and the “Yiddish Ku Klux Klan.” He accused them of “carrying on the most vicious prosecution of white Gentiles ever known in this country.”¹²

With Congress unresponsive to the needs of Blacks and Jews and Hoover obsessed with tailing alleged communists, the ADL, AJC, and ANL took “self-defense” into their own hands. During the war, the three organizations served as unofficial wings of American intelligence, supplying local FBI bureaus, police, and military intelligence units with information about Nazis and fascists in their communities. “If it were not for the Jewish agencies who had accumulated and shared evidence of Nazis and fascist operations,” former FBI agent Milton Ellerin observed decades later, “the Bureau would have had little information to act on.”¹³

From 1945 onward, the ANL monitored, infiltrated, and undermined far-right organizations across the nation. Theirs was not a Jewish campaign but an American campaign against hate. They recruited men and women, Jews and non-Jews, determined to ensure that the wartime fight for democracy abroad would continue at home during the peace. Although most undercover agents were Christians, they never felt they were working for the Jews; they were working to protect democracy. “Just as there were Christians in Germany and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe who sacrificed much, including their lives, to save Jews,” Forster explained, “so there were many Christians in our own country who were deeply motivated, faithful and willingly jeopardized themselves.” Those men and women “were outraged by what had happened in the Hitler period and convinced of the evil of these hate-ridden organizations.”¹⁴

Despite justifications of self-defense, all three groups feared vicious antisemitic reactions if Americans discovered that Jewish groups were spying on Christians. After learning the ADL was running a spy ring, Michigan Congressman Clare Hoffman introduced a bill in 1949 that would make it a federal crime punishable by five years in prison to be a member of “the un-American, subversive organization known as the Anti-Defamation League.” Prominent right-wing religious leader Gerald L. K. Smith and antisemitic columnist Westbrook Pegler joined Hoffman in publicly denouncing “Jewish, Gestapo groups.”¹⁵

“Had we done something wrong?” Arnold Forster asked years later. “We had spent great effort and much money ascertaining what these men were saying in their effort to create an anti-Jewish society and proto-Fascist state.” If the ADL, AJC, and ANL were guilty of anything, he argued, “we were guilty of being thoroughly loyal Americans, wanting to protect our democratic nation as we knew and loved it.”¹⁶

Fear of Christian blowback shaped each group’s approach to spying. The AJC, the most cautious of the three organizations, preferred handling all controversies “quietly behind the scenes without making public issues of things.” George Mintzer relied largely on information gathered from its eleven regional offices and volunteers in its forty-one chapters spread throughout the country. AJC observers, often accompanied by a stenographer, attended street meetings and then sent their reports to Mintzer, who in turn provided authorities with the hard evidence needed to put an end to groups fomenting bigotry in our country. Many of those volunteers were Jewish veterans who had returned from war prepared to fight again at home. “What happened in Germany was very fresh in my mind,” Boston AJC member Norman Rabb noted in 1945. “If it could happen there to an influential and well-integrated Jewry, it could happen anywhere.”¹⁷

The ADL’s Arnold Forster favored a more aggressive approach to spying. After being beaten up by antisemites as a youth, he vowed never to back down from a fight—physical or otherwise. During the 1930s, when antisemitic Christian Front “roughnecks” regularly roamed New York City subways “looking for Jews to attack,” Forster gathered a number of like-minded young attorneys who confronted them with their fists. The subway attacks stopped.¹⁸

For many years, the ADL relied on information that members in its four dozen local chapters passed on to one of its eleven regional offices. However, by the early 1940s, Forster had hired “a cadre of ‘undercover’ field reporters” who joined a variety of hate groups. Many of those thirty-five operatives were “retired local or federal investigators, non-Jews as worried about the safety of democracy as we were.” He asked them to attend meetings, “listen, get copies of what they were publishing, learn about plans against the Jews,” and then report back to him. “I had a man, for example, who looked like a Klansman” in Atlanta, Forster recounted. “I also had a man who, again, looked like a Klansman, in Texas” and “many other places.”¹⁹

Just as Jews sent in spies to monitor right-wing groups, so, too, did right-wing groups send in operatives to spy on the Jews. To counter that, Forster wrote, the ADL always “had two people covering the same area of anti-Jewish activity, we concealed their identities from one another.” If their reports did not “harmonize,” Forster knew that “somebody was putting something over on me.” That meant that sometimes unsuspecting ADL, AJC, and ANL undercover spies reported on one another.²⁰

[picture]

Arnold Forster (Courtesy of Janie Forster Berman)

Like Mintzer, Forster sent their findings to trusted authorities. When officials were slow to respond, he embarrassed them into action by sending undercover reports to influential journalists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, who revealed those findings in columns and radio broadcasts that reached over twenty-five million Americans each week. The ADL also alerted the public to right-wing threats by publishing articles based on spy reports in their ADL Bulletin and their monthly periodical, The Facts.

The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League pursued a far more dangerous path than either the ADL or the AJC. Perhaps because he was a Christian, James Sheldon had no fear of hiring a slew of undercover operatives to act as “agent provocateurs.” He asked these men and women to join hate groups, infiltrate their inner circle, rise to positions of leadership, and destroy those organizations from within. The ANL’s Protestant leader cared less about blowback from antisemites who accused the “Jewish Gestapo” of spying on Christians than about thwarting those who would do fellow Americans grievous harm. On the other hand, all operatives took an oath not to “pose or act in a capacity likely to assume to be as that of any governmental agency.”²¹

Small differences aside, the three men shared one great fear, a fear that resonates to this very day: that dozens of scattered postwar antisemitic and racist organizations would join to form a powerful united fascist front in America. “Anti-Semitic groups can, and have been adequately coped with singly,” Mintzer explained, but “a nation-wide coalition of lunatic fringe elements would present a grave threat not only to the Jewish community, but to the democratic way of life itself.” The ADL, AJC, and ANL also shared a second fear: if left unchecked, small cadres of militant extremists would move from the margins to the mainstream by establishing a foothold in one of the two parties and using it to turn their radical racist demands into law.²²

[picture]

James Sheldon (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Stetson Kennedy approached the ADL at a moment when they were hoping to extend their regional offices and undercover operations into the Deep South. Arnold Forster left New York in fall 1944 to tour ADL offices in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Texas. The spy chief, recounted the son of his boss Benjamin Epstein, “was a good talker” and “loved to be out there” gathering information about recent trends “of interest to the ADL.” Forster’s timing could not have been better, for Kennedy had already established his presence in Atlanta’s Nathan Bedford Klavern No. 1, the Klan’s most powerful and violent group.²³

Forster arrived in Atlanta in November 1944 and immediately met with ADL and FBI officials. Alexander Miller, southeastern head of the ADL, whose office was three floors above Dr. Samuel Green’s medical practice, had been sending the Bureau whatever information he had uncovered, but Atlanta’s Special Agent in Charge Edwin Foltz had nothing but contempt for the Jewish leader and his organization. In a report to J. Edgar Hoover, the local bureau chief referred to Forster’s organization as the “Anti-Deformation League.”²⁴

Hoover was equally dismissive of the ADL, as well as the AJC and the ANL. He regarded the ADL and ANL as self-serving communist-influenced organizations that tried to frighten donors into generosity. Despite profiting from information they gave him about Nazis, fascists, and Klansmen, Hoover bluntly declared these “private investigative agencies had no excuse for existence, that they only created hysteria and contributed to vigilantism and a mob spirit.”²⁵

Stetson Kennedy was equally frustrated by the Bureau’s lack of interest in bringing down the Klan. “Over a period of a decade and a half, I’d offer to bring them weekly reports of the headquarters’ plans. They would just shrug as if whatever I did or not [was unimportant].” Seemingly uninterested in the Klan and other right-wing movements, Atlanta FBI agents “were always questioning me about civil rights and integrationist groups.”²⁶

With the FBI unwilling to help and with Kennedy promising to provide regular reports detailing the secret activities of Klansmen, Forster hired the Southern journalist and gave him the title of director of fact-finding for the ADL’s Southeastern office. In addition to providing them with information about Klan meetings, Kennedy agreed to write articles for ADL publications describing how Southern Jews and Blacks were regularly deprived of their civil liberties.²⁷

The enterprising Kennedy was as shrewd as he was brave. He soon earned two additional streams of income by sharing his undercover reports with the ANL’s James Sheldon and Georgia Assistant Attorney General Daniel Duke. The latter two men first met in 1940 when they, along with Arnold Forster and the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey, joined forces to thwart a proposed alliance that KKK head James Colescott, German-American Bund leader Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, and Paul Castorina, head of the American Union of Fascists, had been working on for three years.

In February 1940, twenty hooded Klansmen in Rosedale, New Jersey, signaled their kinship with Nazis by burning a thirty-foot cross outside a Jewish synagogue and dropping leaflets that read, “All Jews are communists or are communistic.” Quipped one Klansman, “If this doesn’t shut the Jews up, we’ll cut a few throats and see what happens.” Six months later, 800 members of the Bund and 200 Klansmen held a joint rally at the Nazi-run Camp Nordland in New Jersey and cheered as Deputy Bundesführer August Klapprott proclaimed, “The principles of the Bund and the principles of the Klan are the same.”²⁸

The proposed united front never happened. ANL and ADL undercover agents, working with Duke, penetrated the negotiations, gathered hard evidence, and turned it over to authorities for legal action. The subsequent negative publicity campaign generated by Sheldon and the state attorneys general of New York and New Jersey ended prospects of any alliance.²⁹

[picture]

Dan Duke (left) and James Sheldon (right) (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Several years later, when Grand Dragon Samuel Green reorganized the Klan under a new name, Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall asked Attorney General Eugene Cook and Assistant Attorney General Daniel Duke to gather evidence needed to revoke its recent charter. But there was a problem. The assistant attorney general could not trust Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agents because so many of them belonged to the Klan. Needing outside help, he once again called on Sheldon and his agents for assistance.³⁰

Duke and Sheldon had grown close while working together in 1940. Sheldon admired the determined Georgia official’s courage in facing down the Klan. Standing five feet, nine inches, with broad shoulders and weighing 179 pounds, Dan Duke looked more like a college linebacker than a crusading assistant attorney general—and he proved as tough as any football player. A native Georgian, Lawrence Daniel Duke—Dan to his friends—grew up a committed New Dealer and anti-racist. After graduating from Oglethorpe University in 1932, he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps and then earned law degrees from Atlanta Law School and Emory University. When the war broke out, Duke enlisted in the Marines in 1941 and served as a private first class, stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. In January 1943, recently promoted Sergeant Duke sailed off to war on the USS General John Pope.

Before joining the Marines, Duke had worked as assistant solicitor general of Georgia from 1939 to 1941, prosecuting Klansmen. He earned the eternal enmity of the Klan when he sent seven Kluxers to prison for flogging a Black man in 1941. After returning from military service in 1944, Duke was appointed assistant attorney general and once again tasked with overseeing Klan operations.³¹

When he met Sheldon for the first time in 1940, Duke recognized a man equally committed to protecting the civil rights of all Americans. After all, here was a Methodist running a largely Jewish organization that sought to protect Blacks as well as Jews. During their time together, Duke learned how Sheldon’s family had a long history of civil rights activism. His mother had worked on behalf of her church’s social justice causes and his father had run for probate judge in the 1920s as the only candidate in Washington County, Ohio, who refused to join the Ku Klux Klan. His father lost the election, but Sheldon always “admired him for the stand he took.”³²

Duke respected Sheldon’s lifelong commitment to civil rights. The ANL head told him how after earning a master’s degree in government and international law at Harvard University, he had taught courses at Boston University and had taken a series of jobs with New Deal relief agencies. During the early 1930s, he had taught special summer seminars for Black educators at Alabama State Teachers College and Tuskegee Institute, where he became friends with its founder, Booker T. Washington. In 1939, Sheldon had won a seat on the Boston school board in the heavily Black Ninth Ward after newspapers reported that he was a direct descendant of famed abolitionist John Brown.³³

In 1941, after serving two years as chair of its board of directors, Sheldon was named to replace recently deceased ANL founder Samuel Untermyer. He soon expanded the ANL’s focus from calling for an international boycott of German products to running undercover operations against Nazis, fascists, and the Ku Klux Klan. “I was able to persuade the League’s directors that we should also enter the field of anti-democratic activities at home,” he explained, and that meant protecting “the rights of Negroes and other minorities.”³⁴

It is unclear when and how Sheldon and Kennedy first met. Perhaps Arnold Forster tipped off the ANL leader to the journalist’s undercover operation. Sheldon contacted Kennedy in October 1945 and offered to pay him $50 a week ($891 in 2024 dollars) to serve as a “special investigator” for the ANL. In return, Kennedy promised to provide him with regular reports of Klan meetings. Kennedy offered his new employer an additional bonus: he had recruited a well-placed spy (William Bishop) in Atlanta’s second largest Klavern, Oakland City Klavern No. 297, who agreed to take notes at meetings. Kennedy paid him $10 per report, which he then shared with the ADL—and now with the ANL. Hoping to curry Sheldon’s favor, Kennedy named his fellow spy in honor of his employer’s alleged relative, “John Brown.”

After ascertaining that Kennedy’s reports seemed reliable and useful, Sheldon introduced his new agent to Daniel Duke in the waning weeks of 1945. Duke needed hard evidence that could be used against the Klan in court. Kennedy swore he could provide that. At their first meeting, the Southern journalist described penetrating two Klan Klaverns and suggested he could use a “tiny camera, specially made for detective work” to photograph Klan documents that could help their case. Duke immediately offered him a job as a special agent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to work on “Operation Anti-Klan.” Kennedy agreed but under one condition. Since Kennedy had seen several GBI members at Klan meetings, he would report directly to Duke and his identity would remain unknown to the rest of the agency.³⁵

Over the next year, Kennedy and William Bishop attended regular Monday night meetings of both Atlanta Klaverns and sent Sheldon, Forster, and Duke the names of local police and judges who belonged to the Klan and the politicians who courted their votes. Kennedy also warned them that the Klan was aggressively recruiting allies outside the South. In New York City, it operated under the name “The Circle Club,” while in Detroit it called itself the “Dreamland Club.” In Chicago, the siren song of White Supremacy attracted “2,900 members in a single unit.” As for Atlanta, Kennedy characterized most of the hundred-plus meetings he attended as “violently anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Negro, with hints of assassination as the best means of keeping the latter ‘in their place.’”³⁶

Kennedy put his journalist skills to good use by writing articles about the Klan in liberal publications such as Common Ground, PM, and newspapers belonging to the Scripps-Howard chain. To alert the nation’s citizens to repeated instances of Southern violence and injustice, Forster and Sheldon continued sending copies of their spy’s reports to Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell.

Atlanta Klansmen were outraged that Kennedy’s stories contained information known only to someone deeply embedded in their organization. As a member of the Klavalier Klub, the journalist knew the Klan’s innermost secrets—handshakes, passwords, secret rituals—all of which made their way into the press and onto the radio, embarrassing the Klan. “There’s some sonofabitch here who is telling Drew Pearson everything that’s going on in these meetings,” an angry Klansman warned. “[When we catch him,] we’ll take us a pine board. Cover it with tar. Clamp his private parts to the middle of the board. We’ll set the board on fire at both ends, hand him a razor and tell him, ‘Now, you sonofabitch, cut or burn.’”³⁷

Holt Gewinner, head of the Atlanta Klan’s Un-American Activities Committee, was equally furious that “a member [was] betraying the Klan” and warned that when caught “he [could] expect the worst” from the Klavalier Klub’s murder squad. Gewinner’s Klan brethren shared his anger. “The Klan has appointed a set of special officers in Klavern for the purpose of discovering our agents,” a worried Sheldon observed, a situation that posed an “exceedingly dangerous” threat to the seemingly fearless Kennedy. Fortunately, Kennedy made sure that no pictures of him ever appeared in any media outlet, so no one knew what he looked like. But he knew the stakes could not have been higher, for he was playing a highly dangerous game with men who had sworn to torture the traitor before killing him.³⁸

There would be no postwar feeling of brotherhood in the South, Kennedy warned Sheldon and Forster. A race war had begun, and Klan chapters were aggressively recruiting battle-trained veterans into their ranks. Men who had served their nation abroad were now urged “to do something about the ‘niggers’ who got all the good jobs while [they] were in uniform.”³⁹

From the end of 1945 through the summer of 1946, Klansmen rebuilt the Invisible Empire, holding cross burnings and initiating thousands of new members in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Knoxville, and throughout Georgia. Over half the men sworn in at Stone Mountain in May 1946 were veterans. “We are revived,” a joyous Green proclaimed. As more soldiers returned that summer, William Bishop reported that Atlanta’s Klavern No. 297 was regularly attracting 400 people to their meetings.⁴⁰

The rapidly expanding Klan had little to fear from state authorities. Eugene Talmadge, who was running for a third term as Georgia governor, promised Klansmen that “if there should be an uprising among the colored people,” he would “control the military and they would not be called out until the Klan did their work.” Local authorities proved even more amenable to the Klan’s renewed crusade. “The entire Police Commission belongs to [Atlanta Klavern] No. 1,” Green boasted, as did many of the city’s police force and judicial officials.⁴¹

The return of Black veterans after war’s end threatened the Klan’s hegemony over Southern politics. “If I was man enough to fight the war,” vowed one Black soldier, “I’m man enough for everything else.” The rapid expansion of the NAACP from 50,500 members in 1940 to over 450,000 in 1946 concerned militant segregationists. Refusing to retreat to their “proper place,” 100,000 Blacks voted in a special Georgia Democratic primary in July 1946, giving liberal Democrat and Klan foe Congresswoman Helen Douglas Mankin a narrow victory over her racist opponent, Thomas L. Camp. Unfortunately for Georgia’s Blacks and Jews, a complicated voting system similar to the Electoral College swung the election to her Klan-supported foe.⁴²

The Klan responded to postwar Black voting efforts by launching a new wave of violence. Just before the summer Democratic primary, masked groups of Klansmen fired shots into Black homes, warning them not to vote. When Black veteran Maceo Snipes ignored their threats, he was dragged from his house and murdered by four whites. Another Black Navy veteran was given fifty-two lashes at gunpoint for the same “crime.” In Monroe, Georgia, Klansmen roadblocked a car carrying two Black couples prior to the election and shot the vehicle with so many bullets that the bodies were hard to identify. Within five days of the July primary, five more Black citizens were murdered.⁴³

Atlanta’s Black residents had been put on alert: make no trouble and stay in your own segregated neighborhood. Klavern No. 1 maintained a “Housing Kommittee” of “1,500 watchdogs” to make sure no Black family moved into the city’s white West End neighborhood. The Klan also kept a record of every local Jewish or white family who sold property to Blacks.⁴⁴

Beatings or death came to those who refused to listen. Wartime service by Black Atlantans meant little to the Klavalier Klub’s Flogging Squad. Early in 1946, a masked band of men beat up a defiant young Black veteran at Atlanta Municipal Airport, while Navy veteran Hugh Johnson suffered fifty-two lashes for offending a white man. They were only two of the many victims of Klan violence. That spring, Klavern No. 1 sent a “letter of appreciation” to policeman John “Itchy Trigger Finger” Nash “for killing a Negro, which is his 13th.” Justice for minorities would never be obtained when so many mayors, judges, politicians, police chiefs, and beat cops belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.⁴⁵

By the summer of 1946, violence against Blacks and intimidation of Jews had once again become a way of life as Klan militants sparked race riots in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Racial violence grew so intense that Duke traveled to New York City in August 1946 to hold a joint press conference with James Sheldon alerting Americans to the growing danger posed by the Klan. The Invisible Empire, Duke warned, was “trying to poison the minds of our veterans, which the armies of Hitler and Hirohito were powerless to defeat. The Klan carries on where the Nazi Storm Troopers left off, and if justice were fully served the Klan might well be on trial at Nuremberg along with Goering and Gen. Jodl.”⁴⁶

Kennedy and coconspirator Bishop warned Duke, Forster, and Sheldon that the Klan’s Klavalier Klub Whipping Squad had vowed to use “strong-arm methods” to force Blacks into compliance. But the greatest threat, they advised, was happening in Atlanta. Two new self-styled Hitlers had come to the city and vowed to take over the American government and make White Supremacy the law of the land. Emory Burke, Homer Leslie Loomis Jr., and their Columbian organization called for the removal of all Jews and Blacks from the United States, voluntarily or otherwise. The Columbians were so extreme in their racial and religious views that even the Ku Klux Klan refused to have anything to do with them.⁴⁷

With Arnold Forster’s ADL and George Mintzer’s AJC preferring behind-the-scenes observing over direct action, it was up to James Sheldon, Daniel Duke, Stetson Kennedy, and a small cadre of ANL undercover provocateurs to stop the newly organized group before they could launch their plans for murder and insurrection.

3.

The Munich of America

The warm summer day was perfect for a march. The elite storm trooper unit, dressed in brown shirts and sporting armbands with a bright red thunderbolt, goose-stepped down the city’s main street on their way to the meeting hall. Once there, a cadre of muscled brownshirts surrounded the stage while rousing martial music played in the background. After several minutes, the führer stepped to the podium and called upon his right-hand man to recite the Lord’s prayer. With God praised, the führer launched into a blistering attack on the nation’s mortal enemies: Blacks, Jews, and communists. “Our movement is not based upon hate, but upon logic,” he told the crowd. “We don’t want anybody to join who’s not ready to get out and kill niggers and Jews.”¹

The führer was not Adolf Hitler but Homer Loomis Jr., the city Atlanta not Munich, and the year 1946 not 1936. If the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan had an offspring, it would look exactly like Loomis’s recently organized group, the Columbians. Like other veterans, Loomis had returned home from war determined to finish the job Hitler had begun in Europe. The Princeton dropout whom Newsweek dubbed “a toy Hitler” and his fellow Columbians amassed an arsenal of weapons, including dynamite, which they planned to use to destroy the homes of Blacks who ignored their warnings and moved into white neighborhoods.²

Unbeknownst to the self-styled führer, the loyal right-hand man sitting next to him that warm afternoon, William Bishop, was one of four undercover operatives who had penetrated the inner core of the Columbians on behalf of the Anti-Nazi League. Bishop, aka John Brown, reported to Stetson Kennedy, who in turn relayed news of the day’s events to James Sheldon and Georgia Assistant Attorney General Dan Duke.

The Columbians were the brainchild of a most unlikely pair of fascists. Thirty-two-year-old New York–born Loomis, the Columbians’ secretary—who looked “like a matinee idol and talk[ed] like Adolf Hitler”—did his best to speak with a Southern accent, while “scrawny” and “intense” thirty-one-year-old Alabama native Emory Carney Burke, the group’s president, spoke with an affected English accent. What they shared was a determination to lead a second Civil War for White Supremacy with one key difference: this time, their side would win.³

Emory Burke did not grow up hating Blacks and Jews; it came later in life. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1915, he graduated Sidney Lanier High School in 1933 intending to become an architectural draftsman. But the Great Depression and the need to earn a living put an end to that. When he went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps, he still considered himself a liberal and idealist. He harbored no ill will toward Blacks or Jews. He grew to hate capitalism because it treated people like property and believed the United States should recognize the Soviet Union. That changed after Burke began immersing himself in the racist eugenics literature of the 1910s and ’20s: Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1921), Earnest Sevier Cox’s White America (1923), and series of similar publications. Those books convinced him there would be a final “fight between those who believe in the principle of white supremacy and those who believe in race-destruction, viz., social equality.”⁴

Burke’s full conversion to White Supremacy, or nationalism as he and his allies liked to call it, occurred after he moved in 1935 to New York City—not the New York many think of as the center of American liberalism, but the New York that was then the center of fascist activity in the Northeast. The impressionable twenty-year-old’s first job was helping Nazi propagandist Ernest Elmhurst edit two far-right periodicals, the American Bulletin and The Storm. Burke’s apprenticeship with Elmhurst brought him into contact with a virtual who’s who of American and foreign nationalist leaders, among them Anne Tellian, American correspondent for Julius Streicher’s infamous Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer; charismatic antisemitic religious leader Gerald L. K. Smith; and Knights of the White Camelia founder George Deatherage.⁵

[picture]

Emory Burke in Columbian uniform (Georgia State University Archives)

Burke experienced Hitler’s world firsthand when he traveled to Erfurt, Germany, in 1937 to attend a conference of Nazi supporters from twenty-six nations. Over the next several years, Elmhurst and Deatherage taught Burke the importance of building alliances with like-minded groups. By the time the United States entered World War II, Burke’s name appeared on the masthead of nearly every major American fascist organization. In 1944, federal authorities tried Burke’s mentors Elmhurst and Deatherage for sedition and plotting to overthrow the American government. Burke considered these men great patriots and yet the American government wanted to put them in jail.⁶

Exempted from the draft because he was married with children, the slightly built five-foot-eight, 130-pound Alabaman moved to LaGrange, Georgia, in 1940, convinced the United States was fighting on the wrong side of the war. In his opinion, our three main enemies were Russia, communists, and Jews, not Germany, Nazis, and fascists. The war had destroyed the “race loyalty” that American men shared with their “blood-brother the German.” As he wrote to Deatherage in February 1943, “If Germany falls, the entire white race falls and the world will be turned over to the barbarian Asiatic and filthy Jews.”⁷

Knowing his protégé felt isolated after his exhilarating days in New York, Deatherage introduced Burke to Atlanta-based retired U.S. Army general George Van Horn Moseley, who was trying to forge local nationalist groups into a united front. Militant fascists such as Deatherage and Elmhurst hoped Moseley “would lead them to the promised land of nationalism—by the military method if necessary.” The rabidly antisemitic general considered Jews the nation’s greatest plague and described them as “crude and unclean, animal-like things… something loathsome, such as syphilis.” In December 1941, he wrote that European Jews were “receiving their just punishment for the crucifixion of Christ … whom they are still crucifying at every turn of the road.” After the war, he called on the government to sterilize all Jewish refugees coming to the United States from Nazi Germany. “Only that way can we properly protect our future.”⁸

Burke also began corresponding with Ted Giles, an Atlanta resident who shared his racial visions for the postwar world. “It is the sacred duty of the White race,” Burke explained, “to hold in a condition of protectorate the entire world of colored races.” That could be accomplished by sending the nation’s 13 million Blacks to Liberia and 4.5 million Jews to Madagascar. If murder was needed to persuade the two groups to leave the country, so be it. “When the American people awaken to the realities of this age what the Germans have done to the Jews will be a mere tea-party compared to what we are going to do with them!”⁹

As war production geared up, Burke moved his family to Marietta, Georgia, where he worked at the Bell Aircraft plant turning out B-29 bombers. A short time later, he went to work as a railroad draftsman in Atlanta, then a hotbed of groups seething with racial hatred. The Klan was certainly the largest and most powerful organization, but Burke also met people such as Donald Shea, head of the National Gentile League, who praised Hitler as “one of the world’s greatest and most merciful leaders”; and Charles Emmons, whose Commoner Party called for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment and denial of citizenship to Blacks and Jews. But his most meaningful contact came shortly after the war when he met Homer Loomis Jr.¹⁰

Homer Loomis Jr. was born in January 1914 with a tarnished silver spoon in his mouth. He came from a prominent old family that had settled in Connecticut in 1638. His parents maintained an apartment on New York’s tony Park Avenue, along with a place on the city’s Social Register. Family funds had dwindled in recent years, though there was enough money to keep up the appearance of wealth. Homer attended the prestigious St. Paul’s and Groton schools and then went to Princeton, where he was kicked out after several years for repeated drunkenness—which he later blamed on the Jews. His father, Homer Loomis Sr., was a Wall Street admiralty lawyer who represented the Italian Steamship Line until the outbreak of World War II. Loomis Sr., explained his son, started hating Jews after “a Jewish lawyer beat him in an important case”—and continued hating them for the rest of his life. The attorney lost most of his wealthy friends, who found his endless racist and antisemitic rants “arrogant” and “insufferable.”¹¹

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Homer Loomis Jr. (far right) and Columbian members (Georgia State University Archives)

When Homer Jr. was twenty-one years old his first marriage was annulled after his wife, Laura Hampton Hover, told the court how, on their wedding night, he forced her to read aloud in a darkened room “A Madman’s Manuscript” from the Pickwick Papers, the story of a man who plotted his wife’s murder. When she suggested this was impossible, Loomis responded, “I disagree—I have thought about it often.”¹²

After the annulment, Homer, a handsome man with an unearned sense of privilege, drifted along with no job and no prospects until he married Mary Plantiff, whose wealthy family helped him purchase a farm and sawmill operation in Alberta, Virginia. Homer decided to move south “because it was the one place where the race question was not taboo.” He soon alienated friends and neighbors with his unbridled racism and antisemitism. “Hitler has the right idea,” he told them in 1940. “He’s not going to let the German race get mixed up with a lot of inferior races.” After he boasted to neighbors that one day he would “be the ruler of Virginia,” they reported him to the local FBI, which placed him on a list of “potential subversives.”¹³

Inducted into the military in September 1944, Loomis served as a private in the Army’s Second Armored Division as it moved through Europe. “What I saw and heard in Germany,” he told Stetson Kennedy, “made me decide to devote the rest of my life to the counter-revolution in America.” After VE Day, Homer bribed some American officers who allowed him to travel around the country to meet important Nazis whose financial assets had been frozen by the American occupation. Loomis used his father’s connections back home to help them, and they in turn gave him advice on how to launch a fascist movement in America. They suggested that he begin in the South by concentrating on anti-Negro and antisemitic propaganda.¹⁴

Homer took their advice. After receiving an honorable discharge in February 1946, he left Virginia and moved to Atlanta intending to start a new fascist movement. “I had to leave New York to discover America, to get close to the people,” he later said. He saw Atlanta as “the logical place to start something—the South comes to its racial convictions instinctively.” If he wound up getting arrested, he told friends, he could live with that. “If I go to jail for a while, it’ll give me a chance to think and to write a book, ‘Thunder in the South.’ I’m going to be the Hitler of America.”¹⁵

A year later, as his fanaticism grew more intense, his wife Mary filed for divorce and full custody of their two children on grounds of “extreme mental cruelty and indulgence in a violent and ungovernable temper.” Mary did not share her husband’s hatred; she just wanted to lead a normal married life. Why, she asked Loomis prior to their divorce, had his army “association with ‘Jewish and Foreign Buddies’” not given him some “sympathy and understanding of them”? And what of their postwar life together? She feared his political crusade would isolate their family. “What type of friends are we to cultivate? Will you ever have time to play bridge and golf? Do you plan to be home in the evenings?” Loomis did not care for any of that. He felt called to be a leader in the war for White Supremacy. Cut off from his wife’s trust fund, Loomis survived on his twenty-dollar-a-week veteran’s unemployment pension and a series of menial jobs.¹⁶

Loomis arrived in Atlanta in late February 1946 with his eight-year-old Pontiac coupe, boxes of White Supremacist pamphlets, and plans to launch a new party called the Citizens’ Forum. He arrived amid escalating racial tensions and civil unrest across the South. As the postwar Klan grew stronger, lynchings and beatings of Blacks once again became a way of life. This was the world he wanted to be a part of. What his wife had seen as his shortcomings, Homer Loomis saw as virtues that soon led to a partnership in hate.

In May 1946, while working as a fry cook at the Varsity, a popular burger joint near the Georgia School of Technology, Loomis began discussing White Supremacy with a fellow employee, clean-cut, rosy-cheeked James Aiken. After discovering they shared a desire to create a nation free from Blacks and Jews, eighteen-year-old Aiken arranged for them to meet at his friend Emory Burke’s place.

The three men gathered the following evening and agreed that their “whole American way of life [was] under attack.” They would fight to change that. Burke and Loomis denounced liberal Northern politicians who had passed wartime measures that threatened to destroy the social, cultural, and economic foundations of Southern society. Southern whites saw the hated Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) as part of a Northern conspiracy to integrate local industries and take jobs away from white workers. They were partially correct. The FEPC was charged with enforcing President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries, unions with federal contracts, or the government itself because of race, creed, color, or national origin. That meant more jobs for Blacks and fewer positions for whites. Worse yet, as hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers returned from Europe, Jewish and Black civil rights activists pressured Congress to extend the FEPC to include integrating private businesses and passing fair housing laws.¹⁷

Postwar Atlanta was a key battleground in shaping the future of the New South. Local leaders would soon refer to it as the City Too Busy to Hate. But in 1946, while liberal Atlantans were trying to do business in new ways, many of its residents continued dealing with race in old ways. The world Southerners had built before the war, Loomis and Burke insisted, was being destroyed by the left-leaning Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the labor group Stetson Kennedy had worked for prior to his undercover endeavors. The CIO’s Operation Dixie, launched in spring 1946 and headquartered in Atlanta, set out to unionize and integrate all Southern industry, especially its textile factories, and create even more job opportunities for Black workers. Likewise, the NAACP’s “Double V” campaign called for democracy at home as well as abroad—and that meant greater rights for the nation’s Black citizens.¹⁸

Despite the presence of numerous right-wing groups, Atlanta was also home to Southern moderates who wanted to create a world filled with opportunities for all citizens. The city published two of the South’s most progressive newspapers, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. The latter’s editor, Ralph McGill, reigned as the region’s most liberal—and hated—newsman. Black residents were apprised of ongoing events by the Atlanta Daily World, the South’s only daily Black newspaper. Atlanta’s mayor, William B. Hartsfield, who held office from 1937 to 1940 and again from 1942 to 1962, was considered a racial moderate who lent his support to Civil Rights movements of the 1950s. The city also boasted the presence of the liberal Southern Regional Council, prominent Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Sr. and (at that point) deceased former NAACP Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson, and the South’s most progressive synagogue, Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple.

Loomis, Burke, and Aiken believed that the people they thought of as race-mixing liberals were destroying everything they had fought for. They pledged to stop that from happening. The three men envisioned themselves as patriots like George Washington and his revolutionary soldiers. As their initial evening meeting drew to a close, they decided to save the nation from further tyranny by forming a new organization called the Columbia Workers Movement, which they later shortened to the Columbians, Incorporated. Their organization would stand for the white man’s defense of “Race, Nation, and Faith.” Burke, the better read and far deeper thinker, would serve as president and Loomis, the better orator, as secretary and chief spokesman. Hoping to attract as many military veterans as possible, they persuaded ex–Eighth Army Air Force bombardier John Henry Zimmerlee, then attending Georgia Tech, to serve as the group’s treasurer. Aiken agreed to assist Loomis in secretarial chores.¹⁹

Burke promised his partners the Columbians would restore “the traditional southern idea of white supremacy” by recruiting the right kind of men into their organization, men who would fight to protect their families, homes, and jobs from the onslaught of outside liberalism. After all, Atlanta in 1946 was still a thoroughly segregated city with rigid Jim Crow policies regarding public facilities, underfunded Black schools, and all-white fire and police departments, many of whose members belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. William Bishop estimated that eighty-three of the 500-plus members of Atlanta Klavern No. 1 belonged to the city’s police force.²⁰

Burke and Loomis also wanted to restore traditional gender roles that had suffered during the war years. With men off to fight, women had taken industrial jobs that needed to be filled and that paid well. And many were reluctant to give them up after war’s end. This did not sit well with gender conservatives. Once the Columbians were in power, Burke promised, “No woman would be allowed to wear lipstick, smoke, drink, use make-up in any way—all dances would be closed, all drinking stopped, no burlesque shows.” He also railed against working-class white men who frittered their money away buying cigarettes and liquor instead of supporting their families.²¹

The Columbians began their campaign in June 1946 by leasing several rooms on the second floor of a run-down building at 82 Bartow Street in Atlanta’s warehouse district. Short on cash, Loomis and Zimmerlee took up residence in a “bunk room” sparsely furnished with surplus Army cots. Soldiers needed uniforms and the Columbians were no exception. Loomis and Burke created uniforms remarkably similar to those worn by Hitler’s SS men: military-style khaki pants, black ties, and shirts with shoulder patches that had a bright red thunderbolt sewn across them. Columbian recruits were instructed to greet their two leaders with arms raised in a brisk salute and shouts of “Heil, Loomis!” or “Heil, Burke!” To complete the look, they ordered thunderbolt tie-clasps and collar buttons from Herman Fritz Linder, a downtown jeweler who had been interned during the war as a Nazi sympathizer. Burke’s wife, Mary, sewed their first flag, which featured their red thunderbolt, and flew it from their upstairs window on Bartow Street. To prepare for the anticipated onslaught of new members, Zimmerlee ordered stationery and thousands of membership applications.

Loomis and Burke spent the summer raising money and securing mailing lists from sympathetic donors and local fascists. Only the Klan refused to help. They found the neo-Nazi group too radical in their racial views and rejected allying with them for several reasons: the Klan opposed holding open meetings; opposed recruiting mainly from the poorest uneducated elements of the working class (Klan membership roles were laden with older, more prosperous doctors, attorneys, bankers, realtors, and city leaders); and most of all, they feared that backlash to the Columbians’ extreme racism would cause a drop in Klan membership and revenue. Homer Loomis Sr. had no such fears. He promised to solicit money from the few wealthy New York friends who felt the same way as he and his son.²²

On August 16, 1946, with offices, uniforms, and a handful of members in place, longtime Klan attorney Vester Owensby filed paperwork to charter the Columbians in the Fulton County Superior Court. The charter declared their purpose, “To encourage our people to think in terms of Race, Nation and Faith, and to work for a national moral awakening in order to build a progressive white community that is bound together by a deep spiritual consciousness of a common past and determination to share a common future.”²³

Burke persuaded William Bishop, with whom he had worked in the fascist Christian Front and American National Socialist movements during the late 1930s, to be part of their leadership cadre. That would prove his first mistake. Bishop served as an informant for the FBI, as well as for Stetson Kennedy.²⁴

With charter in hand, Loomis and Burke set out to build a movement that would sweep the city, then the state, and then the nation. They would begin by drawing their army from the ranks of the nation’s seemingly powerless poor and badly educated whites. “There are great numbers of young men like these,” reporter Albert Deutsch observed in December 1946, “with poor moorings and no anchorage, who feel like outcasts, who feel that they have nothing to look forward to, whose natural craving for adventure is not socially directed into constructive channels, who have been poisoned by regional and national prejudices, who don’t feel that they belong, who wish desperately to latch on to something concrete with the colorful overtones that youth yearns for.” These men, he concluded, were “duck soup for fascist demagogues”—men like Burke and Loomis.²⁵

Deutsch captured the sense of unease and alienation felt by many returning veterans. Men who had served the country worried whether they would have a job and a home when they returned. They worried whether their wives or girlfriends would still be there for them. They worried whether they could talk about their war experiences with anyone, especially since most families had no idea how to discuss the horrific events of the past several years. The one thing they thought they could count on, deference from Blacks and Jews, was no longer the case. Refusing to return to prewar ways, Black veterans now competed for scarce housing and jobs. After serving their country for many years, poor working-class whites wondered who would speak for them in this new, disorienting postwar world.

More than the Ku Klux Klan, more than Democrats or Republicans, the Columbians addressed the immediate anxieties of Southerners. They promised to keep Blacks out of white neighborhoods. They promised to turn back legislation that made it easier for Blacks to compete for jobs. They promised better wages for Southern workers, who had earned almost less than half of what their Northern counterparts had before the war. And finally, they promised to restore white rule at local, state, and regional levels. The long-ignored ranks of the underclasses now had hope. White Supremacists may have “lost the [world] war,” Loomis remarked, but with the Columbians leading them, “[they were] going to win this way.”²⁶

On a hot August day, on his way to tell Daniel Duke about the previous night’s Klan meeting, Stetson Kennedy saw an enormous Confederate flag flying from the second story of a dilapidated office building on Bartow Street. The not-so-loyal son of the South noticed this was no ordinary rebel flag; superimposed in its center was a large circle containing a red thunderbolt. Painted on the window was a sign: COLUMBIAN WORKERS MOVEMENT/ RACE, NATION, FAITH.

Climbing the rickety stairs, he was greeted by James Aiken, wearing a surplus GI officer’s khaki shirt with a thunderbolt shoulder patch, who threw his left arm out in Nazi salute fashion and spurted out “Hail Columbia!” Kennedy introduced himself as John Perkins, proud Klan member and Atlanta representative of the Southern Outlook. Aiken invited him to step into their three-room office. As Kennedy looked around, he saw a number of old desks, filing cabinets, and chairs; a large portrait of Robert E. Lee; a Confederate battle flag; and a small library of about fifty books, including a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.²⁷

The two were soon joined by Homer Loomis. Kennedy described the Columbian leader as a man “with medium but athletic build, his hair was close cropped, Prussian style, and his eyes and smile had a Satanical look.” After Kennedy offered him a free copy of the Southern Outlook, Loomis returned the favor by offering him a complementary Columbian membership if he could answer three questions: “Do you hate niggers? Do you hate Jews? Have you got three dollars?” After Kennedy responded in the affirmative, Loomis waived the membership fee and welcomed him into their ranks.²⁸

When his new recruit asked about the Columbians’ goals, Loomis explained, “Briefly, the mission of the Columbians is to separate the white man from the nigger, and the Jew from his money.” Trying to impress Kennedy with his macho bravado, the young führer boasted, “We’re forty times worse than the Klan.” Because the Columbians’ growing army was on twenty-four-hour alert, several members lived in headquarters, sleeping on cots and mattresses thrown onto the floor, and did all their cooking on a kerosene stove. This way, someone would always be there in case an emergency call came in—the emergency usually being a Black family moving into a white neighborhood.²⁹

Kennedy also met Betty Penland, “a shapely blonde girl” who volunteered her secretarial services; seventeen-year-old Ralph Childers; and twenty-year-old former marine Lanier Waller. Several younger members Kennedy encountered that afternoon proudly rolled up their shirtsleeves to reveal a Columbian thunderbolt tattooed in red ink on the inside of their right forearm—just as Hitler’s elite SS troops had done. The tattoo, they explained, symbolized membership in the Legion of Loyalty, the Columbians’ inner circle.

When Emory Burke entered the room and began speaking, it became apparent to Kennedy that he “served as the theoretician of the Columbians, while Loomis held the actual reins of leadership with a firm hand.” Both men had a palpable nervous energy to them. “As they talked,” Kennedy recounted, they “paced up and down like caged tigers, consumed by a lust to be free to kill. Carried away by their own rantings, their voices frequently broke and became shrill.”³⁰

If Loomis and Burke had any suspicions about their new recruit, they evaporated when Kennedy’s “Brother Klansman and Klavalier” Ira Jett entered the room, followed by another fascist acquaintance, James Shipp. Both wore Columbian thunderbolts on their coat lapels and warmly greeted the Klan comrade they knew as John Perkins. Kennedy also met William Couch, a former bombardier in the Eighth Army Air Force who spoke German with Loomis and Burke.

Loomis introduced Kennedy to other members, many of whom, like Waller, had served in the military during the war but had fallen on hard times. Living for free at Columbian headquarters was a major incentive for joining. After talking with several recruits and listening to Burke and Loomis’s plans for the future, Kennedy came away convinced the Columbians could pose a serious threat to Blacks, Jews, and democracy.

Kennedy observed how Burke and Loomis cleverly positioned their organization to supersede the Ku Klux Klan by promising to be far more militant in protecting the interests of poor whites—people who had been taken advantage of by wealthy Southern whites for centuries. At the outbreak of the Civil War, only 25 percent of white Southerners owned slaves; the other 75 percent fought a war to preserve a White regime that offered them few benefits other than being told that their White skin granted them superiority over any person of color.

The Columbians preached a politics of resentment—not just against Blacks and Jews, but class resentment against wealthy whites and prosperous Klan leaders who seemingly cared little for the economic fate of the South’s poorest whites. The Klan “played on prejudice without taking the trouble to build up a constructive program,” explained Loomis. The Columbians, however, offered a series of concrete policies that would solve economic, racial, and religious issues forever. Many poor working-class Americans—outside as well as inside the South—resented what they saw as postwar government policies favoring Blacks. The Columbians promised that they, not the Klan, would protect the South from attacks by Northern politicians who wanted to destroy their way of life. They, not the Klan, would secure better jobs and cheaper housing for white men and women. Loomis and Burke aimed their appeals directly at “the working class because they have nothing to lose. We’re going to the masses and putting on a show. We’re telling them stuff they want to hear—that they, the white Anglo-Saxons, are the best people on earth, and that they’re entitled to more than they’re getting. We’re trying to show them they have power in their grasp if they’ll just organize and assert themselves!”³¹

The Columbian leaders promised to protect the jobs, homes, and families of men and women ignored or paid lip service by the Klan. The first issue of the Columbians’ newspaper, the Thunderbolt, called on Southern white men to “Organize to keep your jobs, your homes and your women safe from the blacks who are being coached for the attack by such groups as the [CIO’s] PAC, the FEPC and Southern Conference for Human Welfare.”³²

Like Hitler, Burke and Loomis predicted they would one day run the country, and they would do so on behalf of the working-class whites who formed the backbone of the nation’s economy. Their campaign would begin in Atlanta but would soon extend throughout the nation. As hundreds of thousands of Black families left the South following World War II, race became a national issue and not simply a Southern problem. In 1940, 77 percent of Blacks lived in the South; by 1950, the figure dropped to 68 percent, meaning that one-third of all Blacks now lived outside the South, often in areas that were inhospitable to their presence.³³

Burke offered marginalized men and women a chance to seize power and to do so as American patriots. “We’re going to show the white Anglo-Saxons how to take control of the Government. First a neighborhood, then the whole city, then the state Government, and finally the national Government!” Burke insisted that after the Columbians proved themselves far better protectors of white jobs and housing than the Klan was, the city’s citizens would elect a Columbian as mayor of Atlanta. After seeing what the Columbians could do in office, their numbers would grow sufficient to elect the governors of several Southern states; and finally, within ten years, they would elect the president of the United States. They would try to achieve their goal through the ballot, but if that failed, they would turn to the bullet.³⁴

After Kennedy had listened to a long explanation of the group’s goals, Loomis invited him to attend their first rally scheduled for August 27, 1946, at Exposition Mill Village. The next afternoon, as he neared the rally site, Kennedy heard a phonograph blaring “Dixie” and “Hail, Columbia.” He saw Aiken and Waller distributing antiunion leaflets to curious textile workers. Kennedy watched as Burke stepped up to the makeshift podium and addressed the crowd with a messianic fervor. Repeatedly stabbing the air with his right finger to drive home his points, he promised the “Columbians are the long-awaited movement which is destined to save first the South and then the nation! We fight for our race and civilization! The voices of our dead and unborn millions cry out to us not to bow down.”³⁵

Homer Loomis then took the stage and promised the crowd they could change the world if they formed a united front. “We offer the masses leadership and are willing to die if necessary! If you will just listen to us, you can control America completely in six months! We don’t want anybody to join who’s not ready to get out and kill niggers and Jews! There is no end to what we can do through the ballot.”³⁶

By the end of the meeting, Kennedy was dumbstruck. “This, I thought, is far more than anything the Klan ever dared call for in public under its own name!” The workers who listened to the Columbian speakers had a very different reaction. Lured by the promise of inexpensive housing and jobs that paid well, they formed a long line to pay their three dollars and join the new group.³⁷

Putting aside his sense of horror, Kennedy agreed to attend the Columbians’ first formal meeting later that evening. As he entered the East Point Auditorium, he saw a room decorated with brightly colored Columbian flags and filled with a crowd of 300 working-class men, women, and children. It was an impressive opening turnout. Stepping up to the podium in his Nazi-like uniform, Emory Burke launched into a forty-five-minute diatribe in which he repudiated the American melting pot, lashed out against “Jew-Communist” efforts to integrate Atlanta labor, and warned of an imminent invasion of Atlanta’s neighborhoods, households, and even bedrooms by hordes of Black families. “We are not preaching hatred against the Negroes or any other races, but we do believe in white supremacy.” The solution to their problem was simple: have the government deport Blacks and Jews to Africa “before race-war breaks out.” No Black or Jew would be harmed if they followed the Columbians’ mandate. Those who refused, however, would be murdered. Burke’s frenzied rant grew so shrill that many young children began crying.³⁸

Loomis congratulated Burke on a “magnificent address,” but after learning they had only enrolled forty new members, he confessed to gathered newsmen, “Our approach will have to be toned down for the crowds, then we’ll really have them pouring in to join.”³⁹

Loomis had reason for optimism. Their audiences that night and at subsequent meetings, observed Ralph McGill in the Atlanta Constitution, were “almost entirely good, plain persons of little or no education, of little working skills, in a very low income group.” The Columbians targeted “people whose lives are dreary at best. They work on people in the poorest, most squalid slum areas and to a person unable to read or write, or to one with no more than a third- or fourth-grade education, the appeal has logic. No person likes to admit his own failure and this technique explains satisfactorily to a failure, why he or she is a failure. It removes any personal responsibility. It places the blame on someone else.” The Columbians helped them see that the blame for their disappointing lives fell not on them but on Blacks and Jews.⁴⁰

The next morning, Stetson Kennedy headed straight to Dan Duke’s office to recount the events of the past day. “The Columbian movement,” he warned Georgia’s assistant attorney general, “was definitely on the move and was destined to go places—unless strong measures were taken against it.” Duke told Kennedy he needed hard evidence. Unless they could “pin the blame for some rioting or similar violence on them, it [would] be difficult to get a conviction.” “When I make out warrants against these birds,” Duke said, “I intend to make them stick. That means you’ll have to stick with them until we get the evidence we need.” Duke asked his operative to drop in on their headquarters at least once a day. “You mean that besides riding with the Klan I’ve got to march with the Columbians?” a tired Kennedy asked. “That seems to be the size of it,” Duke replied. “So I was stuck spending many hours daily at Columbian headquarters,” the undercover operative recounted, “keeping my eyes peeled and ears open for what lawyers call ‘actionable evidence’—the stuff jail sentences are made of.”⁴¹

[picture]

James Sheldon and Stetson Kennedy (right) (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

In addition to attending regular Monday night meetings of Klan Klavern No. 1 and occasionally joining William Bishop at Klavern No. 297 gatherings, Kennedy also joined the Columbians’ regular Thursday night sessions at the AFL Plumbers’ and Steamfitters’ Union Hall on 198½ Whitehall Street, the same place where Klavern No. 1 met.

These gatherings, he reported, seemed like a bad parody of Hitler’s party rallies at Nuremberg. The Columbians began their meetings by playing some scratchy old John Philip Sousa records. The Columbian chaplain, William Bishop, would then recite the Lord’s Prayer and add a few hate-strewn words of his own. Uniformed members would pass around a bucket asking for donations, and then it would be time for the main speakers, usually Loomis and Burke, who would deliver the same message: their lives would be infinitely better when Blacks and Jews learned their proper place or disappeared completely.

When he was not attending meetings, Kennedy spent several nights a week at Columbian headquarters hoping to gather evidence for Duke, Sheldon, and the local Anti-Defamation League. Fearing he might be caught breaking into locked file cabinets, he rifled through the Columbians’ waste baskets for incoming mail, drafts of memos, and other potentially incriminating documents. On several occasions he drove by the offices late at night and dumped the contents of their trash can into the trunk of his car.

After looking through the discarded correspondence, the enterprising journalist-spy warned Duke, Sheldon, and Arnold Forster that the Columbian threat extended well beyond Atlanta. As more and more Black men, women, and children left the South looking for new opportunities, hate groups around the nation and even in other countries contacted the two Columbian leaders hoping to forge alliances with the stridently racist organization. Kennedy uncovered correspondence from groups and individuals eager to launch Columbian chapters in Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Alabama, California, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Sweden, and Switzerland.⁴²

The most aggressive approach came from Raymond Vick of Indianapolis. The army veteran, Klansman, and petty thief traveled to Atlanta in the summer of 1946 to meet with Loomis and Burke. He returned home with blank membership cards, arm patches, and a determination to enlist 5,000 Hoosiers in the Indiana branch of the Columbians. Maynard O. Nelsen, twenty-three-year-old leader of Minnesota’s Democratic Nationalist Party, wrote to Burke and Loomis suggesting the two organizations cooperate because they were “working for the same thing.” He intended to turn Minneapolis into “the anti-Semitic capital of the United States.” Only when the “blood of Jews, Negroes and Communists flows freely in the gutters of every street in America,” he wrote, “then and only then will we be free.”⁴³

Hoping to lead a united postwar fascist front, Burke and Loomis began cooperating with myriad established far-right groups such as the American Gentile Army, Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian National Crusade, and James Smythe’s Protestant War Veterans of America.⁴⁴

The rapid national recognition of their organization convinced the two Columbian leaders that one day they would launch their own Kristallnacht—the deadly state-sponsored German riots of November 1938 that had left several hundred Jews dead, more than 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps, and more than 10,000 Jewish businesses destroyed. There would be one major difference. The Columbians’ Kristallnacht would include Blacks as well as Jews. Loomis predicted that once Columbian chapters in the Midwest and Southwest were fully launched, their members would “go into these cities like storm troopers, parading, smashing windows of Jewish stores and scaring people. We will start street fights. After a week or so of this, we will hold a mass meeting and work from there on.”⁴⁵

Impatient to wait the months or years it would take to realize violence on such a massive scale, Burke and Loomis decided it was time for militant action in Atlanta. By early fall, they claimed 2,000 dues-paying members (actual records are closer to 500 paid members), with an additional 800 application cards that were waiting to be processed. Many of those members were drawn from the ranks of the city’s unemployed and poorest millhands. Local interest in the Columbians far exceeded their membership ranks. A meeting in mid-October 1946 drew 3,000 curious men and women.⁴⁶

Their movement was building, but they needed to show Southerners and the rest of the nation that Columbians were not afraid to act. The time for violence had come. They would begin by using blackjacks, guns, and dynamite to convince the city’s Black population that the Columbians were deadly serious. Once they had thrown fear into the Black community, they would turn to the Jews. As Loomis told one supporter, “the Negro would behave if it wasn’t for the Jews. It’s the Jews’ fault that the Negroes are getting out of place.” The Columbians would put both in their proper place, even if that place was the grave.⁴⁷

4.

Let the Violence Begin

The phone call they had been hoping for came at ten o’clock on a balmy night in October 1946. Emory Burke ordered marine veteran Lanier Waller and short-order cook Ralph Childers to report to his home for a midnight meeting to plan a murder. Waller and Childers had joined the Columbians several weeks earlier. Since then, the two had worked and lived at Columbian offices waiting for the day they would be admitted to the Legion of Loyalty. That moment had finally come.

Arriving at Burke’s home dressed in their Nazi-style uniforms, Waller and Childers were greeted by Homer Loomis Jr. “We’ve been weighing you all the way through,” he told the pair. “Hitler had an inner circle of seven and I want one too,” Burke added. After swearing an oath never to reveal anything they heard, the young recruits were clued in to the Columbians’ secret plan to seize control of the American government in order to build a “progressive white” Christian nation. Given the number of Klansmen and White Supremacists in Congress, Loomis and Burke believed such a scenario possible.¹

Burke vowed that after they cleansed Atlanta, the Columbians would “organize in other states and keep going like that” until they built up enough political support among white Christian voters to seize control of the government and become “dictators of the United States.” Anyone who resisted their rulings, Burke declared, “would be shot.”²

Burke and Loomis wanted Waller and Childers to use the Columbians’ substantial cache of dynamite, rifles, and machine guns to begin the war for White Supremacy. They would start by using their arsenal “to burn the Negroes’ houses or bomb them out.” After they terrorized Blacks, Burke planned to dynamite the homes of the Columbians’ most prominent enemies, Dan Duke and outspoken Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill. No one would dare oppose them after that.³

Burke asked Waller to take the lead because he knew the battle-tested marine would not fold under pressure. Likewise, Childers wanted nothing more than to receive the “wartime” experience he had been denied because of his age by killing Blacks and Jews. The Hamburger Heaven employee had enjoyed parading around town wearing the “medal of honor” Burke had awarded him after he beat up a Black man. Childers had been especially pleased when the attack and dedication to the Columbian cause would soon result in his gaining a girlfriend, Betty Penland. Now the two men left Burke’s home prepared to kill and be celebrated as heroes.

During the summer and fall of 1946, Burke and Loomis recruited scores of frustrated working-class men like Childers and Waller. Most were young veterans or “wannabe” soldiers competing with Blacks for jobs and scarce housing in Atlanta’s postwar economy. Men like Waller and Childers were attracted to the Columbians because of their ingrained hatred of Blacks and Jews, and because the group offered excitement and a sense of purpose. “Most of them lead dull lives,” Loomis explained, “work, sleep, maybe an occasional beer. We’re giving them something new, something exciting. We’re satisfying their lust for power. We’re building up their egos, making them feel that they will have a part in the victory if only they’re willing to sacrifice.”⁴

Emulating Hitler’s early brownshirts, the Columbians’ makeshift army practiced military drills around headquarters and attracted public attention by goose-stepping through the streets of Atlanta and giving “Heil Hitler” salutes in public. Members were divided into companies and each company was responsible to a captain. Uniformed Columbians were sent out to patrol the streets of Atlanta and question any Black man, woman, or child traveling through “restricted” white areas.

Loomis and Burke targeted naïve young men like Ralph Childers. Born on a farm in Forsythe County, Georgia, in December 1928, James Ralph Childers, Ralph to all his friends, was the kind of undereducated but ambitious man Loomis and Burke wanted for their army. He had moved to Atlanta with his family when he was eleven, had quit school a year later, and by thirteen was living on his own making ends meet by driving trucks in Chicago. Moving back to Atlanta when he was seventeen, the handsome youth with brown eyes and dark black hair got a job working at the popular Hamburger Heaven near Atlanta’s West End. The restaurant’s owner, Ira Jett, was a longtime Klansman and head of the Columbians’ “strong-arm squad.”⁵

During the summer of 1946, the teenager found himself dazzled by several regular customers who always wore uniforms with a red thunderbolt insignia when they came to dine: Homer Loomis, Emory Burke, and Jimmy Aiken. “One day I asked them what their insignia meant. Jimmy and Homer told me that it meant running the Negroes back to Africa and killing the Jews out.” Childers responded that he “never could stomach niggers” and resented their buying homes that he and poor working-class whites could not afford.⁶

Burke and Loomis invited Childers to visit their headquarters and then attend an outdoor rally. Traveling to 82 Bartow Street later that day, the short-order cook had sworn he hated Blacks and Jews, paid his three dollars, and joined the Columbians. Childers became such a devoted regular at Columbian headquarters that Loomis asked him to quit his job, move his things into Bartow Street, and work for the group on a full-time basis. In exchange for taking “emergency” calls from concerned white citizens, he would receive free housing in their barracks-like rooms. Enormously flattered, he accepted.

Childers’s first assignment involved patrolling poor white working-class neighborhoods on behalf of the Columbians’ Community Home Protective Association. Burke and Loomis knew that to supersede the Klan, the Columbians had to do more than just terrorize Blacks and preach messages of white supremacy. They needed to show white workers that the Columbians would advance their material interests in meaningful ways. Burke promised to protect the “underprivileged—those of our brothers and sisters that many of the politicians call ‘poor white trash.’”⁷

In 1946, that meant defending white homes and jobs from the onslaught of Black families eager to improve their lives by moving into nicer neighborhoods. As in many crowded postwar cities, Atlanta’s Black and white residents searched for affordable housing in a region where few new units had been built during the war years. Ramshackle as it may have been, housing in Atlanta’s white working-class West End was still superior to the segregated Ashby Street neighborhood that contained 40 percent of the city’s Black population before World War II. Returning Black veterans wanted a better life for their families but discovered that two-thirds of nonwhite houses either were dilapidated or had no bathroom.⁸

Burke and Loomis believed that if Columbians succeeded in zoning off the West End, “white people would vote for some Columbian to be mayor of Atlanta.” To that end, the Columbians organized their Community Home Protective Association along clear military lines. Burke and Loomis appointed a captain to lead each section; the captains in turn commanded five lieutenants who supervised ten sergeants. When Kennedy asked why there were no privates, Loomis smiled and responded, “Every man an officer. You know—Kingfish Huey Long’s idea—‘every man a king.’ They love it.”⁹

Uniformed Columbians like Ralph Childers were ordered to conduct a block-by-block, house-by-house survey of Black and white families in the West End to determine homeownership by race. That information was entered every day onto a large map of Atlanta neighborhoods that hung inside Columbian headquarters. For each home, they listed one of several entries on the map: “Owner will not sell to Negroes,” “Owned by whites. Safe,” or the dreaded “Sold to Negroes.” To make sure residents knew which areas belonged to each race, Columbian foot soldiers posted large signs with their red-bolt insignia throughout the West End, “Zoned as a WHITE COMMUNITY.”¹⁰

Childers and Jimmy Aiken spent evenings patrolling the West End dressed in uniforms and armed with rifles, pistols, blackjacks, and sawed-off shotguns. “If you see any niggers so much as walking on the wrong side of the street,” Loomis told the pair, “stop ’em and whip ’em within an inch of their lives.” If things got rough and they had to kill someone, Loomis ordered them to “put a knife in his hands and tell the policeman he drew a knife on us.” Over the next few weeks, Childers estimated that he and Aiken assaulted “a dozen or so” Black men; none of those cases made the police blotter because victims did not trust the Atlanta Police Department.¹¹

The group’s patrols received little attention until the night of October 28, when Childers and two other Columbians spotted twenty-three-year-old Clifford Hines walking down Formwalt Street listening to a portable radio he held under his arm. “Here comes a damned nigger now,” Childers yelled. The three men got out of their car, drew a gun on Hines, used a blackjack to beat him into semi-consciousness, and began pushing him into their car. They intended to drive him out of town and send a message by murdering him. White neighbors heard the man scream but did nothing. Fortunately for Hines, a police car drove by as he was being held at gunpoint and forced into the backseat of the Columbians’ vehicle. Uncertain who started the scuffle, police arrested both Childers and Hines on charges of assault and battery.¹²

Childers’s arrest earned him headlines in local newspapers and a special place in Columbian annals. He was freed after Loomis posted a $500 bond (Hines was released on a $100 bond), and the Columbian führer awarded Childers a “medal of honor.”

The Columbians made headlines again three days later after Minnie Sibley’s home was bombed. The Black woman had just moved her family into what she believed was a “colored section” of town. She was mistaken; she had moved into the previously all-white West End part of Ashby Street. As their moving van pulled up to their new home, the Sibleys were greeted by Columbian Jack Price, who warned them “this was a white neighborhood.” If they did not turn the truck around, he promised “to blow up everyone.” A defiant Minnie Sibley ignored him. “It is my house and I got the right to move in.” At three thirty the next morning, a stick of dynamite thrown from a passing car demolished the Sibleys’ porch, shattered their windows and front door, and scared the hell out of their neighbors. Police suspected the Columbians, but no arrests were made.¹³

A defiant Minnie Sibley refused to move. Loomis responded by sending two Columbians to her home with orders “to shoot any colored man who comes out.” They were soon joined by several men who took rifles and pistols with them. Fortunately for the Sibleys, when the Columbians arrived, they found the police sitting in front of their home, determined to avoid further violence.¹⁴

A third incident on November 2 cemented the Columbians’ reputation as far greater protectors of poor white interests than the Klan. When Frank Jones and his family—which included his recently demobilized son Eddie—tried moving into a formerly white-owned home on Garibaldi Street, their moving van was surrounded by a mob of forty Columbians who demanded they leave the area. Jimmy Aiken warned Jones “he’d be blown up” if he tried to occupy the house.¹⁵

A standoff soon occurred as angry Blacks gathered on one side of the street and Columbians and several dozen white citizens on the other side. Stetson Kennedy watched as Loomis and his followers “were literally doing a war dance and letting out blood-curdling whoops and curses, trying to provoke the whites into action.” Violence was avoided when the police showed up and arrested four of the uniformed troublemakers—Loomis, Aiken, Jack Price, and Roy Whitman—who carried signs that read WHITE COMMUNITY ONLY and ZONED FOR WHITES. As Loomis flippantly told the cops, “We figured the police had their hands full with nigger troubles elsewhere in the city. So, we thought we’d help protect this white neighborhood from invasion.”¹⁶

As they were taking Loomis to police headquarters, one sympathetic detective told a red-hot Burke, “Take it easy. We all know a race war is coming, but if you aren’t mighty careful you Columbians are going to touch it off before the whites are ready. The niggers’ homes are armed to the teeth, and the whites’ are not. If you fellows keep on, you’re going to get all the whites around the nigger sections killed before we can bring things under control.” Several days later, all charges were dropped because of insufficient evidence. “We’ve got some good friends in the police department,” Loomis gloated. An unmollified Burke blamed their troubles on “Jewish Communists” and began to write “Exterminate the Jew!” or “ETJ” in his daily calendar.¹⁷

[picture]

Crowds gather after Columbians threaten Jones family (Georgia State University Archives)

One good thing came out of the day. After Stetson Kennedy had turned out for the Garibaldi Street demonstration and had proved himself a steadfast member, Burke admitted him to the Columbians’ Legion of Loyalty.¹⁸

The three well-publicized incidents coming so close together—the beating of Hines, the bombing of the Sibleys’ home, and the effort to stop the Jones family—proved a boon to Columbian fortunes. As the city’s Black and white press reported on the violent events, Columbian membership swelled by over 300 percent and attendance at meetings rose proportionately. Now that Childers had proven his mettle and kept quiet when interrogated by police, Loomis asked him to work with Lanier Waller to expand their campaign of terror against Atlanta’s Black community. The greater the terror, the greater the chances for Columbians to bolster their local and national membership.¹⁹

Lanier Waller was the kind of tough, highly trained veteran that Loomis and Burke hoped to build an army around. Born in Atlanta in November 1926, Waller was the youngest of John and Beulah Waller’s seven children. Like many Columbians, he led a hardscrabble life. His father died when he was seven; when his mother passed four years later, Lanier was sent to an orphanage in Sherman, Texas. After being whipped by the superintendent, he ran away to Houston and worked on a tugboat until he was fifteen. Lying about his age, at sixteen he joined the Marines in July 1942. The willowy five-foot-seven, 140-pound recruit with blue eyes, brown hair, and a light complexion was sent to Guadalcanal and Bougainville, where he was wounded and contracted a bad case of malaria. Despite his injuries and illnesses, Waller cherished his combat experience and told of enjoying “killing Japs.”²⁰

Ordered home to convalesce, Waller was honorably discharged with a Purple Heart in June 1944. However, when the Marines discovered his true age, the now eighteen-year-old was allowed to reenlist as a private first-class and sent to the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C., where the recovering soldier with “a nervous condition” was finally released in August 1945. Eight months later, he was back in Atlanta, living on a 100-percent service disability pension, and earning his high school diploma while working part time loading cargo at the airport.²¹

One night after the Hines beating but before the Sibley bombing, Waller was eating at the Hangar Restaurant when Ralph Childers walked into the room with his girlfriend, Betty Penland. He recognized Childers because his handsome smiling face had been plastered across the front pages of the city’s newspapers. Waller approached the uniformed Columbian and asked about joining the group. “I didn’t have anything else to do so I went up and got to talking to Loomis,” Waller later recalled. He thought what he heard “was a pretty good thing—segregating niggers, etc. . . . That was my main interest in joining because I just don’t like niggers.” Childers invited him to their headquarters to get more information. When Waller told Emory Burke that he had joined because of his earlier conversations with Childers, Burke ordered the two to work together. Explaining that he wanted “some young veterans and young people” to stay in the office on a twenty-four-hour basis, the Columbian president invited the cash-strapped Waller to move into headquarters along with Childers and several others.²²

Why would a marine who had fought foreign fascists on behalf of his country now want to join an American fascist organization? Unthinking racial hatred—hatred he had been taught as a child to think of as “natural.” Growing up in the South, Waller was enchanted by the exciting spectacle of Klansmen parading through the streets in their flowing white robes as crowds gathered to cheer “them as you would a group of soldiers returning from the war.” He grew up seeing how Blacks were afraid to defy even a young white boy who told them to move to the back of a bus. Knowing his “skin made [him] superior to start with,” Waller “longed for the day to come when I could ‘ride with the Klan and kill a damn nigger.’”²³

When he wound up in Texas working on a tugboat, he went drinking with fellow workers and noticed how whenever they passed a Black man on the street “they’d hit him for no reason except the fact he was a Negro. Every remark they made about a Negro or a Jew was something bad.” He never doubted their wisdom. “I made myself believe and act as they did . . . the seed of hatred was planted in me and was still growing.” These men may have been poor, but Waller noticed how Jews and Blacks cowered before them.²⁴

Waller’s wartime service did little to diminish his prejudice. “In my outfit there were boys from almost every state. Protestants, Catholics and Jews. I made it a habit to choose the boys from the South as my friends and thought it smart not to associate with those damn Nigger loving Yankees. I fought the Civil War many a time with them as did most of the other boys.” He loathed platoon mates who thought eating or going to school with Blacks was a natural thing. Years later, he realized his prejudice had been misguided. But “back then,” it had seemed a basic way of life to him and thousands “of race haters today who know no better.”²⁵

When Waller returned to Atlanta after the war, full of hatred, his desire for “excitement of some sort” made him “perfect bait for the Fascist demagogues” like Burke and Loomis. When Childers took him to Columbian headquarters for the first time, the two leaders explained how the “colored were overrunning the whites and the Jews were organizing to help the coloreds.” They asked Waller to help remedy the situation. Unemployed and with few prospects, he agreed. “I still hated . . . This looked like the chance for excitement that I wanted.” Being part of a new group like the Columbians also offered a chance to become an important man far more quickly than if he joined the Klan and had to spend years rising through its ranks.²⁶

Waller and Childers spent their days traveling the city in the Columbians’ sound truck, announcing upcoming meetings, warning Blacks to stay out of white neighborhoods, and handing out copies of the Columbians’ Thunderbolt newspaper. Waller wanted more responsibility but realized that the Columbian leaders “didn’t trust [him] yet.” That changed on the night he and Childers were summoned to Burke’s home for dinner and conversations about death—Black death and Jewish death.²⁷

Not wishing to frighten away potential supporters, Burke and Loomis often downplayed calls for mass murder in favor of mass deportation. But privately, they believed a few murders were needed to convince Blacks and Jews to leave the country voluntarily. Now that Waller and Childers were part of the Legion of Loyalty, the Columbian president told them about the group’s arsenal of deadly weapons. The pair had earned his trust and he now wanted them to work with Ira Jett. Every militant organization needs a brutal thug who scares members as much as enemies. That was Jett. A fifth-grade dropout, Jett had worked as a plumber and then opened his hamburger joint. Like Burke, the forty-year-old native Atlantan had avoided military service because he was married with two young children.

Jett took a shine to Childers and Waller and wanted their help securing more weapons. “Jett looks like a gangster and acts tough,” Waller recollected. Jett told them he needed “somebody that won’t talk, keeps his mouth shut and is just bloodthirsty.” “Hell, you know I’m just as bloodthirsty as they come,” Waller responded. “I’d cut a throat as soon as look at anybody.”²⁸

Several nights later, Jett drove the three of them along the Bankhead Highway until they came to Jess Johnson’s home on the outskirts of town. Jett took out ten dollars and the one-armed Johnson handed him five sticks of dynamite. Another exchange of cash produced several guns, one of which Jett handed to Waller and one of which he put in his car’s glove compartment. The Columbians then drove half a mile to the home of another ally, who provided more pistols, rifles, and tear gas. Jett told them that he had yet another contact in New York who promised to send rifles, machine guns, and ammunition.²⁹

“Seeing that arsenal that night” convinced Waller “that this talk about sending the Jews to Palestine and the Negroes to Africa wasn’t just talk.” The Columbians were preparing for a deadly armed insurrection. Loomis and Burke had drawn up an enemy “lynch list” that included Atlanta Congresswoman Helen Douglas Mankin, Dan Duke, Ralph McGill, and Chief of Police Marion Hornsby. All that anticipated violence made Waller pause to consider what he was getting involved with. There was “something sneaky and mean about it. Not like that clean tough feeling you had in the Marines.” Putting Blacks and Jews in their place through beatings was one thing, but mass killing was something else. But he said nothing. “A fellow like Jett is liable to cut your throat before you can cut his.”³⁰

The violence unleashed against Hines, the Sibleys, and the Joneses, and the threat of even greater terrorism by the Columbians, sparked outrage and condemnations from many veterans’, religious, and legal groups in Atlanta—all of whom called on authorities to curb the fascist organization. The Atlanta Daily World, the city’s African American newspaper, gave extensive coverage to the Columbians’ reign of terror and demanded action from the mayor and governor. ADL national director Richard E. Gutstadt told the press that his organization was keeping “close scrutiny” on the Columbians and hoped local officials would shut them down.³¹

Several city officials listened and responded. Following the beating of Clifford Hines, Mayor William Hartsfield ordered a full-scale probe of the group. Police Chief Hornsby followed by declaring total police war on the White Supremacists after the Sibley bombing. Hornsby, a longtime member of Klan Klavern No. 1, was less concerned with protecting Blacks than with bringing down the Klan’s rival. After the police chief carried out his pledge by breaking up a Columbian meeting, the Atlanta Christian Council and the Atlanta Black Baptist Ministers’ Conference adopted resolutions praising him and urging a grand jury investigation into the Columbians’ activities. “It is inconceivable,” the Baptist group declared, “that the Christian people of our beloved city and country would remain complacent when sinister movements as the Columbians appear to represent are unleashed on our people.” Even KKK Grand Dragon Samuel Green joined the chorus denouncing the Columbians, telling the press that “no true Klansman would join them.”³²

On November 4, 1946, two days after the Jones family incident and ensuing public outrage, Governor Ellis Arnall announced his intention to revoke the Columbians’ charter on the grounds that it did not live up to its claim of being a “benevolent and charitable organization.” The following day, Daniel Duke filed suit in the Fulton County Superior Court to do just that. “In those border areas where Negroes and whites live close together,” he told reporters at a press conference, “we have a potential powder keg that could break forth any day in bloodshed.” Duke promised to revoke the Columbians’ charter, insisting that the group was “peddling hatred and intolerance among our people,” not education.³³

Atlanta’s Jewish War Veterans took a far more direct approach to confronting the Columbians. After reading their antisemitic leaflets accusing Jews of “taking all the wealth and money in the nation,” Arthur Weiss, a former marine captain who had fought at Guadalcanal and now served as commander of the Atlanta branch of the Jewish War Veterans, urged fellow members to attend the Columbians’ next meeting. Max Kuniansky went a step further and asked twenty-five tough Jewish veterans to confront the Columbians and “run them out of town.” The group included his brother Harry and one of his burly non-Jewish friends, both of whom played football for the University of Georgia. Max Kuniansky asked them to remain outside the meeting hall and not “let anybody out of [t]here unless I tell you.” Kuniansky hoped no police would be at the meeting because “if there was any trouble, we wanted to beat the hell out of the Columbians.”³⁴

On the evening of October 31, the Columbians drew nearly 500 people to 198½ Whitehall Street; approximately 250 were local Jewish veterans. After opening with the usual playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the singing of “Dixie,” and a prayer from William Bishop, Emory Burke stepped to the podium and launched into a diatribe against Blacks and Jews. “Our heroes in Europe didn’t die to give a nigger the right to marry a white American girl.” Turning to the members of the Jewish War Veterans in the audience, he promised “to make it hotter and hotter until you [Jews] go back to the Bronx, where you came from; and I say one day we are going to march into the Bronx.”³⁵

Homer Loomis told the Jewish veterans the Columbians planned to send them all to Madagascar. “Every nation which has ever amounted to anything has first had to expel the Jews,” he explained. “Jews have never taken the trouble to become American citizens in the sense that other people from Western Europe have,” he told the large crowd. “They think only of preserving the Jewish traditions, the Jewish way of life and, worst of all, Jewish bloodlines.” The “Jew will die for what he believes in,” Loomis insisted, “but I’ve never seen one die for the American world.”³⁶

As Loomis ended his speech, Arthur Weiss stood up and shouted, “Lies! You’ve been spouting nothing but lies. I’d like to have a chance to answer the charges you’ve made.” Burke responded by screaming, “Throw the Jews out!” An angry roar rose from the crowd as Ira Jett and several Columbians rushed the impudent Jewish speaker, pistols drawn, followed by other members sitting in front rows. The Jewish War Veterans were not intimidated; they had seen a lot worse. Half of them “stood their ground, while others, seeking to avoid trouble, attempted to quell the disturbances.” An unfazed Max Kuniansky stood up and warned, “If you touch a hair on any Jew in the city of Atlanta, we’re going to beat the hell out of you.” Violence was avoided when three police detectives jumped into the fray and separated the two groups. The Jews left after Loomis announced that the rest of the meeting would be closed to members only. Walking out of the building, one veteran remarked, “Is that what we fought for—or against?”³⁷

Daniel Duke and James Sheldon knew everything that happened that evening. Sitting in the back of the meeting hall surrounded by his fellow Columbians was Stetson Kennedy. The undercover agent returned home that night, wrote up notes about the near-riot, and sent them to his employers. More importantly, he warned them that the Columbians were assembling an arsenal of weapons they would use to launch an armed insurrection.

Kennedy had been doing double duty since August, ingratiating himself with Columbians and Klansmen alike. A constant presence at Columbian headquarters, he soon struck up a friendship with Lanier Waller. After working together for several weeks, Waller confided to Kennedy that he had grown “sickened at their brutality” and the prospects of even greater violence. He told Kennedy, who he knew, of course, as John Perkins, about driving with Ira Jett to purchase dynamite, M-1 rifles, pistols, and ammunition. At first, he said, it had seemed exciting, but the more he thought about it, the more concerned he had grown about killing innocent men and women—even if they were Black. He bristled when he remembered an amused Jett casually telling him they could get away with murder. “If some nigger house got blowed up or burnt down, nobody would know anything about it.” The police, Jett had promised, would do nothing.³⁸

Waller’s tipping point came shortly after the Atlanta Black Baptist Ministers’ Conference had denounced the Columbians. Hoping to teach them a lesson, Jett had begun gathering more dynamite with the idea of blowing up a convention of 400 Black Baptist ministers slated to meet in Savannah later that month. Whatever their color, these were God’s ministers and that bothered Waller. Jett also planned to bomb the office of the Columbians’ most outspoken critic, Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill.³⁹

After listening to Waller, Kennedy hurried off to tell Duke the news. The next morning, he was sitting in the office of Duke’s secretary when he saw Jess Johnson, the one-armed man who had provided Jett with dynamite, enter the room. Johnson refused to say anything until Duke pulled out a copy of Mein Kampf the police had seized when they raided Columbian headquarters and then pointed to a picture of Hitler’s SS guards wearing the same thunderbolt emblem. At that point, Johnson broke down. “Mr. Duke, if that’s what these Columbians stand for, I’ll tell you everything I know, even if I have to go to jail, I lost a boy in the fight against Hitler.” Johnson signed an affidavit confirming everything Waller had told Kennedy; Jett had paid him for the dynamite and wanted to buy even more.⁴⁰

After listening to Johnson, Duke and Kennedy were left wondering whether the Columbians could pull off one, let alone two bombings. How far would these men go in carrying out their threats of violence? Bombing the Sibleys’ porch was one thing but blowing up a building filled with people whose only offense was their skin color was quite another.

Duke had no choice. He simply could not take a chance. The Columbians had operated for several months with seeming impunity. They marched around Atlanta in their Nazi uniforms, but no one stopped them. Young Columbians patrolled the streets of the West End armed with a variety of weapons, but no one stopped them. Editors of Atlanta’s white and Black newspapers condemned the group, but no one stopped them. Their rabidly racist and antisemitic ideology proved even too severe for the Ku Klux Klan, but they did not try to stop them. Only when the Columbians resorted to bombings and open violence did the police intervene and make arrests; but those arrests were for minor offenses that might merit a night in jail but would earn the jailed Columbian the admiration of his peers and perhaps a cute girlfriend like Betty Penland.

By early fall, Burke and Loomis believed their militant defense of white homes would lead to capturing the city’s substantial working-class vote and with it a position of authority and power. Were they delusional? Not entirely. They were certain that their neighborhood patrols and the terror they instilled in the Black community would earn them thousands of new members—and it might well have done so if the Columbians had been able to continue their reign of terror. Burke was already writing notes for a book explaining how his racial theories would allow patriotic Americans to save their nation. Wake Up America: The Story of the Columbians (1949) would be one of five books he would go on to publish.⁴¹

Duke knew Kennedy was right. They needed help to bring down the Columbians and they needed to do it before they grew strong enough to rival the Klan. Filing lawsuits to revoke the Columbians’ charter was not enough. Duke needed proof of their violent intentions to be able to put their leaders in jail and bring their movement to a halt. Having Stetson Kennedy on the inside was not enough. Members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation or the Atlanta Police Department could not be trusted. Outside help was needed, so Duke once again turned to the man and organization that had aided him in the past: James Sheldon and the Anti-Nazi League.

The New York spymaster responded to Duke’s request by sending in two of his best undercover agents: Mario Buzzi, a French-born Christian who posed as an Italian American fascist, and Renee Fruchtbaum, a twenty-four-year-old Brooklyn Jew who posed as a wealthy bored antisemite who had come to Atlanta to help her companion forge an alliance with the Columbians. Both knew the penalty for getting caught.⁴²

5.

Bringing Down the Columbians

Dan Duke knew who he wanted to spy on the Columbians: Mario Buzzi, the intrepid Anti-Nazi League agent who had helped him foil the proposed Nazi–KKK alliance in 1940. He knew the experienced agent would not back down if threatened by the Columbians or the Klan. But Duke and Sheldon needed to be careful. Pursuing either group entailed a great deal of risk. After Governor Ellis Arnall tried to revoke the Association of Georgia Klans’ charter in June 1946, he received an anonymous call warning, as he recalled, that “the Klan is not accustomed to having public officials interfere with its activities in Georgia. They say they are going to ‘get me.’” This was no idle threat; the FBI uncovered a plot to assassinate the governor. The Columbians had promised a similar fate for anyone caught betraying them. Buzzi couldn’t have cared less.¹

At first glance, Mario Buzzi looked like he could have been your burly, bear-hugging Italian uncle or the smiling but deadly mafia thug sent to collect a debt. Born in Marseille, France, in April 1902 and raised in Turin, Italy, Mario ran away from home at twelve and worked on a ship sailing to Argentina. In 1918, in the midst of World War I, the sixteen-year-old lied about his age and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Following his military service, he worked on vessels that took him to France, Italy, and, in 1920, New York City. Unsettled by what he had seen during World War I, Buzzi accepted Italian antifascist Carlo Tresca’s offer to work on his newspaper, Il Martello.²

For the next two decades, Mario Buzzi allied himself with the city’s leading antifascists, writing articles for newspapers, giving speeches on street corners, and serving time in jail for allegedly murdering two local fascists. “In all the years I spent here in America,” he told James Sheldon, “I took an active part in everything connected with the fight against Fascism, Nazism, and discrimination. I never tried to take advantage of any opportunity solely to my personal benefit, but always tried to live up to the principles of humanity and for humanity. This caused me many troubles but I do not regret it.”³

In 1939, Buzzi went to work as a special investigator for the Anti-Nazi League infiltrating Klan and fascist groups in New York, New Jersey, and the Midwest. He soon established himself as Sheldon’s most valuable agent, spying on group after group without ever being discovered. When Duke asked Sheldon for help in gathering material that could be used in court against the Columbians, Buzzi agreed to go to Atlanta.⁴

On September 11, 1946, Buzzi met with Daniel Duke at the state capitol and received, as he later told it, “the names of a few of the most dangerous persons that I was to investigate.” The assistant attorney general cautioned him “to be very careful because I had to deal with very vicious groups of people.” Duke also gave him a phone number to call “in case I needed help.” Over the next few weeks, Buzzi, passing himself off as one Gino Falco, a member of the Christian Brotherhood of New York, met with several of the city’s leading fascists and Klansmen. He had come to Atlanta, he told them, to organize the city’s Italians against Jewish and liberal Catholic organizations. He also wanted to work with local nationalists to defeat the hated Congress of Industrial Organizations, an organization controlled by “a powerful click of Jews trying to do in the South what they did in the North.” Klansmen and fascists loved hearing a New Yorker talk that way. After meeting with several groups, Buzzi told Duke what he had learned and then returned to New York for his next assignment. That assignment came sooner than expected.⁵

On Saturday morning, November 23, after traveling south by train, Buzzi and ANL operative Renee Fruchtbaum met with Duke to lay out a plan of action they and Sheldon had drawn up in New York. After listening to the pair, Duke approved the scheme.

The following morning, Buzzi met with the much-admired George Van Horn Moseley in the retired general’s Atlanta hotel room. The purpose of the meeting was to establish Buzzi/Falco as a “connected” fascist who could then drop the popular general’s name to like-minded men. To allay any suspicion, Buzzi gave Moseley a letter of introduction from one of his many New York fascist contacts.⁶

An hour later, Buzzi made his way to 82 Bartow Street, walked into the Columbian offices, and asked for Homer Loomis. Handing the uniformed leader the same letter of introduction he had given to Moseley, Buzzi explained he had traveled to Atlanta “to organize some of the Italian residents in the City who still do not belong to my organization, the Sons of Italy.” The ANL operative explained that he had met with Moseley, “who told me so much about the Columbians and of the necessity for us Italians to cooperate, and, if possible, work together with this new organization which is fighting for good and sound American principles.” Impressed, Loomis asked him if he knew New York fascists Joseph Kamp and Colonel Eugene Sanctuary. “I told him that not only did I know them, but that I was very friendly with both of them.” What he did not say was that he had spied on both for the ANL.⁷

Convinced he was in the presence of a fellow fascist who could help expand his operation, Loomis explained that the Columbians were determined “to fight one of the greatest menaces which hangs over the South today—the Jew, that the Jews are playing up to the Negro in order to get them on their side so that they can control the majority of votes and in so doing elect representatives who will work in their own interest in the next election.” Insisting there was “no difference between the Negroes and the Jews—the Jews are not white,” Loomis welcomed Buzzi’s help. He needed experienced organizers “because he can’t rely on the local people,” reported Buzzi; because, Loomis had said, they “are not intelligent enough.” The only ones doing a good job “were he and Emory Burke.”⁸

Buzzi’s only fleeting moment of fear came when Burke entered the room. The Columbian president stared at him closely and said he thought he knew Buzzi; “he thinks … that he met me someplace but does not remember where.” Fortunately, Burke vaguely remembered him as a friend of his New York mentor Elmer Elmhurst.⁹

Loomis and Burke were delighted when Buzzi added that he had traveled to Atlanta with an assistant, Renee Forrest (Renee Fruchtbaum), who had been active in pro-Nazi organizations before the war and now wanted “to be of help in any way possible to fight the Jews and the Negroes.” Loomis was especially pleased. “The more young girls we have the more young men will join our organization and that is our work—to try to keep them with us and make them active members.” Loomis invited Buzzi and his assistant to attend the next Columbian meeting. The two agents did not wait that long.¹⁰

The next evening, Buzzi took Forrest to Columbian headquarters. “It is in a very dingy old building,” she wrote to Sheldon. “The stairway was very dimly lit” and the office walls were plastered “with clippings about themselves.” As Loomis and Burke greeted them, the Brooklyn Jew introduced herself as a “bored New Yorker with a private income” who had come to help Buzzi forge an alliance with the Columbians and other fascist groups. As they settled down to talk, Loomis launched into a rant claiming, “the Jews are feeding the Negroes with a lot of propaganda and pulling them over to fight the white people.” Columbian tactics were like those of Hitler’s minions, but they would “not make the mistakes that the Nazis made.” No one would defeat them, not even Dan Duke, who Burke called “nothing more than a ‘small’ beast” who “deep down in his heart is as anti-Negro and anti-Jew” as the Columbians.¹¹

When Loomis and Burke explained their plans to expand into Northern and Midwestern cities, Fruchtbaum suggested she could introduce them to influential people in New York who would be interested in starting a Columbian chapter. “I said that as a young person I had always been aware that Jews and Negroes prevented me and others like me from getting anywhere in this country. I told them about my past interest in all kinds of Christian Front organizations … They loved that.”¹²

Fruchtbaum promised to return the next day and to help with their much-needed secretarial work, which she would do for free to serve the cause. Loomis was delighted and told her she could help type letters, file documents, and take shorthand notes of speeches made at meetings. Before leaving, Renee filled out an application card, swore she hated Jews and Blacks, paid her three dollars, and joined the Columbians. Loomis was so impressed with his attractive recruit that he invited her to sit on the speaker’s platform at their next meeting.¹³

Like Mario Buzzi, Renee Fruchtbaum had gone to work for the ANL to “fight for freedom.” Born in Brooklyn in 1922 to a Jewish Russian father and Polish mother, she joined Sheldon’s group in 1944 as a secretary and researcher. She did so well that he soon asked her to work undercover, joining several New York fascist groups and reporting what she found. After Stetson Kennedy mentioned that the Columbians wanted more women to draw men into the group, Sheldon asked the pretty petite blonde with deep violet eyes to accompany Buzzi to Atlanta. She was precisely the kind of office help who could attract young males.¹⁴

Burke and Loomis’s invitation for Forrest/Fruchtbaum to help with secretarial work was the moment Duke and Sheldon had hoped for. The undercover agent would have access to materials that Stetson Kennedy could only dream of obtaining. She spent the next three days answering phones and doing assorted secretarial work. Fruchtbaum remained in the office late into each evening, insisting there was much to be done. There was—just not the kind of work Loomis and Burke expected. She spent three nights rifling through cabinets and using a tiny camera hidden inside her cigarette lighter to photograph hundreds of pages of incriminating documents and correspondence. Not once did she lose her nerve, not even after Loomis told everyone he would “fix” any traitor he found in the Columbians.¹⁵

On one evening, when few people were around, she managed to open locked file cabinets and photograph a trove of Burke’s personal correspondence with fascist leaders in Germany and throughout the world. She found letters boasting how he would outdo Hitler when it came to exterminating Jews.¹⁶

Photographing documents would prove useful for any court case, but testimony from disgruntled Columbians would be even more effective. Fruchtbaum soon struck gold. During her three days inside Columbian headquarters, she became increasingly friendly with Ralph Childers’s girlfriend, Betty Penland. Betty found herself drawn to the sophisticated New Yorker and asked if they could spend time together outside headquarters. At first, Fruchtbaum feared Penland had become suspicious of her, but that was not the case. “She said that she was not happy at home or her work with the Columbians.” She wanted to go to New York with Renee and live a more interesting life. Penland added that Childers and his friend Lanier Waller were equally eager to leave Atlanta.¹⁷

None of this surprised Fruchtbaum. She noticed that the two Legion of Loyalty members “hung around the office as much as possible, avoiding direct participation in the group’s street-rioting, speech-making and anti-Negro and anti-Jewish activities.” They were worried about Duke’s recent efforts to arrest Columbian leaders and members; neither wanted to spend any serious time in jail. Waller had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the group after his gun-purchasing trip with Ira Jett. “I’m disgusted,” he told Fruchtbaum. “People in this town seem to think we’re Nazis or something.” Childers was equally upset. Working for a “race war” had left him and Waller penniless, while Columbian leaders regularly dined at restaurants their members could not afford. Worse yet, Waller’s former girlfriend had broken up with him, fearing she might be beaten up one night while out with her Nazi-uniformed boyfriend. “That left me all alone. I didn’t know who to turn to,” he later stated—until he met Fruchtbaum.¹⁸

Hoping for a new start, the two men were willing to provide evidence about the Columbians’ violent aims. To prove their good intentions, Childers handed Fruchtbaum a notebook with a copy of the Atlanta’s Police Department’s blotter that contained a daily record of all complaints, violent incidents, and arrests—thereby allowing Columbians to see the names of those filing charges against them. Childers also turned over the Columbians’ street-by-street survey detailing where every Black family lived and which white families might be willing to sell them homes in white neighborhoods.¹⁹

[picture]

Sheldon, Fruchtbaum, Waller, Childers (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Upon returning to her hotel room that night, Fruchtbaum telephoned Sheldon. He ordered her to pack the documents and her camera and take the next plane to New York City. The following morning, she told Loomis that her mother was ill; she would return as soon as possible. Before leaving, Fruchtbaum gave Childers and Waller a “secret New York telephone [number]” where they could reach her. Several days later, Waller phoned her explaining that after a bloody fistfight with Homer, he and Childers “wanted to get Loomis and the rest of them.” Fruchtbaum spoke with Childers, who confided he had proof that the Columbians were a “crooked organization” with “real plans to overthrow the government.” After both men agreed to sign affidavits, Renee arranged for them to fly to New York and meet with James Sheldon—who in turn phoned Dan Duke with the good news.²⁰

In the weeks before Buzzi and Fruchtbaum’s arrival, Duke had been busily preparing his case against Emory Burke, Homer Loomis Jr., and the Columbian organization. After Duke filed a motion on November 5 to revoke the Columbian charter, Georgia solicitor general E. E. “Shorty” Andrews promised to prosecute the group for violating state laws. “It is an outrage,” he told reporters, “for any group to foster racial intolerance against Jews and Catholics who fought side by side with Protestants in the recent war.”²¹

The legal battle began the next day when Ralph Childers was arraigned before Judge A. W. Callaway on charges of assault and battery. The judge found him not guilty but bound him over to the grand jury on charges of “inciting to riot.” Homer Loomis and three other Columbians were charged with “disorderly conduct—inciting to riot.” Refusing to back down in the face of legal pressure, Loomis, Burke, and their minions attended the hearings dressed in their khaki Columbian uniforms.²²

Burke took their defiance a step further at a special meeting on November 7. Insisting they would not be cowed by Duke’s promise to revoke their charter, Burke took a copy of the charter and tore it to shreds. The Columbians were no more, he told the faithful; they were now the Columbian Party and therefore no state charter was needed. Their party promised higher wages for white workers as well as total race separation. Overjoyed at Burke’s boldness, the enthusiastic crowd shouted, “Send the pieces to the Jews!” Burke promised that the publicity generated by the state’s persecution of American patriots would “only serve to make [their] people more interested in [their] program.”²³

Over the next few weeks, Duke and Solicitor General Andrews filed multiple charges against the Columbians. On November 18, the Fulton County grand jury indicted Burke, Loomis, and treasurer John Zimmerlee on five misdemeanor counts of inciting to riot and usurpation of police functions. Each charge carried a possible sentence of one year in prison. Childers was arrested on charges of inciting a riot for his role in the Clifford Hines assault. Warrants were issued for their arrest and bond was set at $5,000 for the leaders and $1,000 for Childers. Two days later, James Aiken, Jack Price, and veteran R. L. Whitman were charged with disorderly conduct. The accused all pleaded not guilty.

When police went to arrest Loomis, they discovered he was in New York City to raise money for his defense and to discuss the case with his father, Homer Loomis Sr., who agreed to represent him in court along with defense attorneys J.E.B. Stuart of Atlanta and Phil Davis Jr. of Tulsa. Judge Edgar Pomeroy set their case for December 6.24

As he worked with Solicitor General Andrews preparing their case, Duke realized they had a problem. Given the likely racial composition and ideology of Atlanta juries, the current charges would probably lead to a series of modest fines and perhaps a few days in jail. To destroy the Columbians, they needed to charge Burke and Loomis with crimes that would put them away for years. The evidence Stetson Kennedy had provided—meeting notes, a membership list with telephone numbers, and a map of the city Columbians had divided into white and Black sections—was not enough. Duke was under pressure to act fast. Governor Ellis Arnall, who had spearheaded the investigations of the Klan and Columbians, was voted out of office in the fall 1946 elections and would be replaced in the new year by arch segregationist M. E. Thompson. Word had it that Thompson would fire Duke, Attorney General Eugene Cook, and the entire office of the attorney general and replace them with pro-Klan men. Rather than give Thompson the satisfaction, Duke planned to resign and return to practicing law—but only after he succeeded in prosecuting the Columbians. Time was now of the essence.

Duke’s frustration came to a boil on the day he was due to meet with Mario Buzzi. That morning, while in Judge Pomeroy’s court, Duke was subjected to another series of relentless personal attacks by Emory Burke. The Columbian leader had been haranguing the assistant attorney general throughout the hearing as a traitor to his race. When he accused him that morning of being a tool of the Jews and not “a white Anglo-Saxon public official,” Duke lost it. Yelling, “Dad blame it, I’ve taken all I can from you,” a greatly aggravated Duke wheeled around and floored Burke with a single punch to the head that left the reedy Columbian with a bloody one-inch gash over his left eye. “You’ll answer for this,” Burke spat out. The barrel-chested Duke immediately apologized to the court. “I don’t know what came over me. But I’ve been subjected to more abuse and vilification from these Columbians than I could stand.” A contrite Duke offered to pay Burke’s medical expenses. When the dazed leader demanded that Duke be arrested for assault, Judge Pomeroy claimed not to have seen the incident. “I must have looked away for a moment.”²⁵

A shaken Duke left the courthouse to meet with Mario Buzzi and Rene Fruchtbaum, who found him “very nervous and upset” by the morning’s encounter. Fruchtbaum had returned to Atlanta hoping to convince Childers and Waller to travel to New York and swear out notarized depositions describing the Columbians’ many illegal activities. They agreed. In their subsequent testimony, the pair recounted Columbian plans to seize control of the American government; to beat up or murder any Black man or woman who challenged their authority; and to dynamite the homes and meeting places of their most obstinate enemies.²⁶

After reviewing the content of the affidavits on the phone with Sheldon and learning more about Jett’s plans for subsequent bombings, Duke had the evidence he needed to charge Burke and Loomis with a series of crimes that would likely lead to lengthy jail sentences.

On December 10, James Sheldon—who never shied away from a photo opportunity—Buzzi, Fruchtbaum, Childers, Waller, and Duke held an elaborately staged press conference in Atlanta. Unlike the American Jewish Committee, which generally preferred to keep their findings quiet, Sheldon always sought maximum publicity for the ANL’s success, as a way of both publicizing threats posed by hate groups and raising money to sustain his operations.

Reporters were taken with the dramatic testimony provided by Buzzi, Fruchtbaum, Childers, and Waller. That latter pair told the press about the “inside workings” and aims of the Columbians. They described the Columbians’ “lynch list” that included McGill, Representative Mankin, and Duke. They told how Jett planned to bomb the Atlanta police station and the Municipal Auditorium. And finally, they recounted how Burke and Loomis had ordered them to beat up or murder any Black man or woman who tried to move into their closely patrolled white neighborhoods. Duke had proof the Columbians were trying “to establish in the United States a private police force, similar in organization and objectives to Adolph [sic] Hitler’s infamous Elite Guard of SS Storm Troopers.”²⁷

The highlight of the tightly packed press conference came when Duke pulled out several sticks of dynamite and told startled reporters how they were part of the Columbians’ plans for violence and death. There was only one problem. Stetson Kennedy, who attended the press conference as John Perkins, remained behind after its conclusion to ask Duke, “Where in the hell did you find their dynamite?” “I didn’t say it was their dynamite,” Duke replied. “I went out and bought those sticks this morning.” A rare smile undoubtedly crossed Duke’s face as he delighted in the deception.²⁸

The press conference—and especially the dynamite display—proved a tremendous success. “Armed with dynamite and affidavits submitted by two Columbians turning state’s evidence,” the Atlanta Constitution reported, “authorities branded the Columbians and their efforts to “establish a Nazi-like government in the United States” as “virtually dead.” Praise went to Duke and Andrews, but the greatest accolades were saved for James Sheldon and his daring operatives. The “spark plug in the undercover probe was said to be Professor James H. Sheldon.” He and his representatives arrived in Atlanta carrying “many of the Columbian records, along with two Columbians.” The liberal Atlanta newspaper also praised Stetson Kennedy for spying on the group and gathering evidence on behalf of the ANL.²⁹

Duke was now ready for trial. At the press conference, he and Attorney General Cook told reporters they would prove the group planned “to intimidate and injure members of minority religious and racial groups”; that they had conspired “to bring about the arrest of innocent Georgia citizens on false charges”; that they had assembled “a private arsenal of deadly weapons”; and that Loomis, Burke, and Jett had conspired to bomb a home on Ashby Street. Thanks to several months of work by Sheldon and the ANL, the two prosecutors had sworn affidavits and over 200 pages of documents Renee Fruchtbaum had photographed from Columbian files. Fruchtbaum returned to Atlanta several more times and convinced several Columbians to avoid possible jail sentences by turning state’s evidence.³⁰

[picture]

Mario Buzzi (center) holding dynamite seized from Columbians (Waller & Childers to left) (Georgia State University Archives)

Loomis and Burke denied all charges and banished Waller and Childers from the group. Newspapers delighted in describing how Columbian leaders had been deceived by Buzzi and Fruchtbaum, and especially how the attractive New Yorker had used a disguised camera to gather evidence. A furious Burke and Loomis responded by swearing out warrants for the arrest of Buzzi, Fruchtbaum, and Sheldon (whose real name, Burke insisted, was Jacob Shapiro) on charges of “usurping police powers.” In a separate counter trial, Ira Jett swore out a warrant against Buzzi claiming the undercover operative assaulted him at a downtown hotel. After Dan Duke testified that he had invited the ANL agents to Atlanta to help his investigation, Judge Quincy Arnold, called in to hear the case, dismissed the charges against the three for “lack of evidence.”³¹

On December 13, a Fulton County grand jury returned indictments against Jett, Loomis, and Burke for illegal possession of dynamite. Loomis Sr. wired his son $3,000 that he raised from supporters, but making bail on these latest charges emptied the Columbians’ treasury.³²

Whatever joy Duke and Sheldon felt was dampened by a series of columns by antisemitic journalist Westbrook Pegler. Dismissing the Columbians as “a rather juvenile group,” Pegler accused the “sinister” ANL of operating a “secret, private espionage system” that was far “more dangerous to the peace, freedom, privacy and dignity of the citizens of Georgia and all the other States” than the Columbians. Sheldon’s group of “sneaks and spies” had taken it upon themselves to decide “whether any person or organization is ‘subversive’ and should be ‘exposed.’” This meant that good Christian citizens who did nothing wrong would have “their privacy and their peace” assaulted by the intrusive Jewish group.³³

Sheldon struck back. Speaking on Atlanta radio station WAGA, he explained, “We have adopted the policy of reporting some of our investigations to the public so that Klan members would be deterred from action by the knowledge that secret activities had been penetrated by our agents.” He praised Drew Pearson and the Atlanta bureau of the United Press for alerting the public to the dangers discovered by his agents. Duke also defended the New York “information service,” insisting that he had invited them to Atlanta to help gather evidence.³⁴

Not everyone was happy with the publicity surrounding the Duke–Sheldon alliance. J. Edgar Hoover was furious that ANL operatives had accomplished something his own agents had not—and received all the praise. “What are we doing and why [didn’t] the FBI get this conspiracy itself?” he queried Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Edwin Foltz. When the Columbians first appeared, Hoover contemptuously dismissed them as “just a front for the KKK.”³⁵ Foltz also minimized the group’s danger, dismissing them as “street hoodlums,” “juvenile delinquent types,” and “immature gangsters.” Trying to assuage Hoover, one Bureau official argued that Sheldon “was merely using the organization” for personal “aggrandizement.” Falling back on an old antisemitic canard, he accused Sheldon’s group of being a communist front.³⁶ No mention was ever made by Hoover or his Atlanta agents of their rude dismissal of offers of help by Stetson Kennedy or the ADL’s Arnold Forster. Hoover was so busy pursuing alleged communists that he repeatedly overlooked threats on the right.

On Tuesday, February 11, 1947, spectators packed the overflowing Atlanta courtroom to hear the first round in the state’s case against Homer Loomis Jr. and Emory Burke. They and Ira Jett were charged with four counts: riot, inciting to riot, usurpation of police powers, and illegal possession of dynamite. The day’s only setback came when the judge allowed separate defenses for Burke and Loomis; prosecutors would begin with Loomis and then hold a second trial for Burke.

The Columbians were no longer just a local or regional story. Coming only fifteen months after the end of World War II, the Atlanta trial involving a neo-Nazi plot to take over the American government attracted the attention—and condemnation—of newspapers and radio stations throughout the nation. The court proceedings were also closely followed by Black and Jewish periodicals. The trial even inspired the nationwide release in April 1947 of a feature film called Violence, based on the Columbian story. The film included a scene of a fascist group being subverted by a female undercover agent modeled after Renee Fruchtbaum.³⁷

Solicitor General Andrews opened the prosecution’s case with a dramatic account of how Loomis and Burke had entered a “general conspiracy” to establish a “program of hate and violence” that would lead to the establishment of a nation ruled exclusively by “white gentiles.” This was no pipe dream, he told the jury. The Columbians had already “zoned off certain sections of Atlanta” with the intention of preventing Blacks from “hanging around or loitering in white neighborhoods.” Anyone who resisted them would be beaten or killed. The state would present evidence about Columbian plans to “dynamite the [Municipal] Auditorium” during an upcoming convention of Black Baptists, as well as the home of newspaper editor Ralph McGill and several offending politicians.³⁸

Following his opening statement, Andrews called his first set of witnesses. Clifford Hines described being beaten by Ralph Childers for the offense of walking through a white neighborhood. He was followed by Mrs. Hattie Harris, who witnessed the event and confirmed Hines’s story. The day’s star witness was Ralph Childers, who recounted in detail everything he had told Sheldon in his sworn affidavits: how he had been deceived into thinking the Columbians were a patriotic American organization but had left the group when he discovered their true aims centered on hate, violence, and death.

Childers was the star, but the day’s surprise witness was Betty Penland’s brother, Clarence H. Kight. Like Childers and Waller, the twenty-two-year-old Navy veteran and former Columbian had decided to turn state’s evidence. He told the court of the Columbians’ plan to seize political control of Atlanta, the South, and then the nation. Once in power, the group would force all Jews and Blacks to leave to United States. He also explained how Loomis and Burke ordered members to beat up or kill any Negro entering their designated white-only neighborhoods.³⁹

Sitting in the courtroom on the trial’s opening day were Homer Loomis Jr. and four Columbians all dressed in Columbian brown-shirt uniforms with red thunderbolt shoulder patches. Only Emory Burke had the good sense to avoid antagonizing the jury by dressing in a conservative blue suit and tie.

After three days of testimony, Andrews rested his case. That afternoon, Homer Loomis Sr. opened the defense by attacking the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League and accusing the state’s case of being nothing more than a “Jewish conspiracy.” Loomis Sr. called his first witness to the stand: Loomis Jr. After swearing to tell the truth, Loomis Jr. spent over three hours telling the jury why he had formed the Columbians. Describing himself as an “American Nationalist” who believed in the “rights of white people,” Loomis insisted, “We need an America which would have one people, people of one blood.” Race mixing would only lead to lower “living standards” for hard-working whites. He denied advocating violence, denied accumulating weapons, and swore he just wanted to send Negroes back to Africa, not kill them. He ordered his men to patrol the West End neighborhood only after white residents had asked the Columbians to keep Blacks out.⁴⁰

Loomis Sr.’s surprise witness was Betty Penland. The attractive teenager was furious that Renee Fruchtbaum had taken Lanier Waller and her boyfriend Ralph Childers to New York but left her behind. Quickly shifting loyalties, she had started an affair with Loomis Jr.—one that had landed her in court on morals charges when the unmarried couple were found together in a hotel room in early February by her brother, Clarence Kight. None of that was mentioned that day. Like Loomis, Penland told the jury that the “Jews came down here” to start trouble.⁴¹

Loomis Sr. concluded his defense with a rambling two-hour closing argument. He told the jury his son was being “crucified like Christ by the Jews.” Loomis Jr.’s only crime was daring “to criticize organized Jewry.” The Jews, he told them, “have taken over your radio, your press, your money, and now they want your fair skins and your straight nose, your blond hair, your blue eyes.” Tired of listening to this hate-filled rant, Superior Court Judge Clark Edwards, who now presided over the case, pulled out a newspaper and started reading the comic section during Loomis’s closing argument.⁴²

After Loomis Sr. rested his case, the jury left to deliberate and returned twenty-nine minutes later with a guilty verdict. Judge Edwards sentenced the Columbian cofounder to one year in a public works camp for incitement to riot. Sitting in the courtroom that afternoon, delighted at the verdict, were James Sheldon and Renee Fruchtbaum. Their moment of triumph was blunted when Loomis Sr. filed a motion for a new trial and succeeded in having his son released on a $2,000 bond.⁴³

Emory Burke’s trial began the next day. Many of the same witnesses were called and many of the same arguments were made on both sides. In a meandering four-hour address in which his voice often reached a high-pitched screech, Burke told the jury that the Columbians were defending their city from the “concerted, deliberate attack against Southern institutions, and the attempt to break down the white race which is being carried on by those organizations most prominent in trying to send me and others to the chain gang.” His testimony was countered by former Columbian James Aiken, who told the jury how the group planned to gain control of Atlanta “within six months” and then seize control of the state and federal government.⁴⁴

At the end of five days, the all-white male jury convicted Burke of three counts of usurping police power. As he issued a one-year sentence for each count, Judge Edwards told the Columbian leader, “You have overtaken to usurp authority. You have gone contrary to our form of government and our way of life.” Justice, however, would be delayed. After his attorney filed an appeal, the thirty-one-year-old neo-Nazi was released on $3,000 bond.⁴⁵

Despite the prospect of more trials, James Sheldon was delighted with the verdicts. “The conviction of Loomis and Burke by two Georgia juries,” he told the press, “is one of the most encouraging things which has happened since the end of the war, and will stand out as an example to law enforcement agencies in every one of the States.” Solicitor General Andrews praised the ANL for providing information “of tremendous value” that had enabled the prosecution “to bring to justice this vicious group which sought to undermine the very foundation of the democratic principles on which this nation was founded.”⁴⁶

Bringing down the Columbians would take longer than expected. Loomis faced three more trials on charges of rioting, usurpation of police authority, and possession of dynamite. Each time he was convicted, he appealed and was freed on bond. Burke faced two more trials for riot and illegal possession of dynamite. He, too, kept filing appeals that caused his case to drag on for several years while he remained free.

Nevertheless, by the end of February 1947, the Columbians were essentially dead. Their two leaders were preoccupied with avoiding lengthy jail sentences; meetings had been halted indefinitely; several members of the Legion of Loyalty had turned state’s evidence; and dozens of rank-and-file members simply quit. Two of the Columbians’ out-of-state allies suffered a similar demise. Acting on evidence supplied by Sheldon and Georgia officials, authorities in Indianapolis shut down the Columbian branch organized by Raymond Vick, while Minneapolis police arrested Maynard Nelsen, leader of the neo-Nazi Democratic Nationalist Party.⁴⁷

The Columbians remained on life support but the racial violence they initiated continued. In early March 1947, two Black families who moved to the white West End neighborhood had their homes bombed; another family reported that someone broke into their house and painted the letter “C” and a red flash on her walls. Six more explosions rocked the Ashby Street area over the next four months.⁴⁸

Klansmen and Columbians were overjoyed when Dan Duke retired after he secured convictions that February. With Duke gone, Grand Dragon Samuel Green called on Klansmen to “Get Kennedy!” In October 1946, the intrepid journalist had published Southern Exposure, which recounted his undercover work inside the Ku Klux Klan and exposed many of their rituals and acts of terror. Kennedy also sold his stories to the producers of the Superman radio show. That June, 4.5 million listeners tuned in to hear Superman expose Klan secret rituals, passwords, and activities as he single-handedly defeated the Invisible Empire. Members of Atlanta’s Nathan Bedford Klavern No. 1 were deeply embarrassed when their children began “playing a new kind of Cops and Robbers called ‘Superman against the Klan.’” As one Kluxer lamented, “I never felt so ridiculous in all my life.” An equally distressed Grand Dragon Samuel Green reported that the Klan had lost members due to the radio series. Kennedy was pleased. “I knew that millions of kids who had listened to Superman were not likely to grow up Klansmen.”⁴⁹

Infuriated Klansmen wanted revenge, but no one knew what Kennedy looked like. He had taken care to ensure that no picture of him ever appeared in newspapers or on the cover of his books. When Kennedy attended a New York City book launch sponsored by Sheldon, he showed up in full Klan regalia with his face covered and never took it off.

Kennedy escaped a near brush with death in April 1947 when he was called to testify at Ira Jett’s trial for illegal possession of dynamite. Prosecutors and defense attorneys had both included the journalist on their witness lists. Solicitor General Andrews knew he was risking Kennedy’s life when he asked him to testify. “Nigger killing may be considered a misdemeanor,” Andrews warned him, “but nigger-loving is a capital crime.”⁵⁰ Kennedy agreed to testify anyway.

When he walked into the courtroom in late April, Columbians and Klansmen greeted their comrade with a friendly, “Hi Perkins. Haven’t seen you around for a while.” Smiles disappeared when the court clerk called the name Stetson Kennedy and he answered present. “Just about every head in the place started spinning,” Kennedy recounted. As he entered the defense witness anteroom, Kennedy was surrounded by hostile Columbians. “Of all the goddamned nerve,” Ira Jett yelled. “It’s Perkins! So, he’s the rat! Let me at him,” roared another Columbian, who pulled out a knife and lunged for the traitor’s throat. The deputy in the room remained motionless. Jett saved Kennedy’s life by kicking the assailant in the shins and forcing him to drop his knife. “Goddamn you, Perkins or Kennedy or whatever your name is,” Jett spat out. “I hate your guts as much as anything. But I don’t want our boys to get in trouble by cutting your throat on the fifth floor of the courthouse.” Jett turned to his comrades and reassured them, “We’ll take care of this guy later.” “You’ll never get out of Atlanta alive,” added another Columbian. After testifying, Kennedy called his CIO labor union friends, who brought a cadre of tough men to escort him out of the courthouse to safety.⁵¹

The Klan did not forget Kennedy’s betrayal. Now that they knew what he looked like, Klan leaders raised the reward for his capture from a mere $1,000 to $1,000 per pound.⁵²

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Stetson Kennedy talking to reporters after the trial (Getty Images)

Following the first round of guilty verdicts, James Sheldon spent the next several months speaking to Jewish, Black, religious, veteran, and civic groups around the country calling for constant vigilance. At a meeting in Washington, D.C., in March 1947, he warned there were twenty groups and individuals still working in close cooperation with the remnants of the Columbian organization and their allies. At a New York gala, he advised that “it would be a grave mistake to say that the destruction of the Columbians was anything like a turning point in the battle which we must constantly wage against these evil forces. This is a battle which has to be continued and won all over again every season.”⁵³

Sheldon’s only negative note came when he leveled a sharp attack at his sometime allies in the American Jewish Committee, a far more conservative group that, unlike the ANL, rarely publicized its findings or drew attention to itself. “If we had not been vigilant,” he told a Jewish audience in Philadelphia, “or if we had listened for one moment to the ‘hush-hush’ organizations [AJC], they [the Columbians] might by this very moment have become too powerful to be dealt with at all.” In all fairness, the AJC believed in the “quarantine treatment,” which involved starving far-right groups and speakers of all publicity; without it, they would disappear.⁵⁴

There was one downside to Sheldon’s undercover operation: three of his top spies—Buzzi, Fruchtbaum, and Kennedy—had been exposed. Now that their pictures had appeared in the press, none could be called on for further espionage work. Kennedy could no longer operate as John Perkins, but he continued providing Sheldon with reports from “John Brown” and newly recruited Klansman-turned-spy Gerald Henderson. Kennedy took great satisfaction in reporting that Klan leaders were so determined “to get rid of the Anti-Nazi’s ‘spies’” in their midst, that they often expelled “innocent men” from their ranks.⁵⁵

The ADL, Stetson Kennedy’s other employer, was equally pleased. Arnold Forster and Atlanta ADL head Alexander Miller took great pride in their achievements. “The strong public campaign that was launched” by them and the ANL, Forster noted, “unleashed powerful enough counteractive forces” that the Columbians remained “with only few centers of influence.” Like Sheldon, Forster cautioned against complacency. Atlanta still had five active Klan chapters that contained many “city policemen and other minor officials.”⁵⁶

The final death knell for the Columbians came on June 27, 1947, when the state of Georgia revoked its charter. The Klan suffered a similar fate that month when state officials revoked their charter. In a humorous swipe against his enemies, Kennedy applied to charter his own “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” in August 1947 and listed himself as the “Imperial Wizard” of the mock Klan.⁵⁷

After exhausting all his appeals, Homer Loomis Jr. reported to Reidville Penitentiary in spring 1950 accompanied by his new wife, Ralph Childers’s former girlfriend Betty Penland. Burke also began serving his sentence that fall. Justice, however, would be short-lived. The State Parole Board pardoned Loomis in February 1951 after he served only five months in prison. He returned to Atlanta and began attending Atlanta Law School. Burke’s request for a pardon was denied, but he too would be released before the end of the year. He would soon embark on the next stage of his struggle for White Supremacy.⁵⁸

The Columbians were dead but not their cause. “Tendencies to dismiss the Columbian order as just another crackpot, hoodlum movement, are off the beam,” warned reporter Albert Deutsch. “With just a little more effective timing or balance, the movement might have clicked and thrown not only Georgia but the country into chaos.”⁵⁹

The moment one hate group was put down, another rose to take its place. Leaders and members simply moved on to new struggles in new groups but with the same goal: preserve White Supremacy and minimize the power of Blacks and Jews. This pattern would be repeated again and again, lasting well into the twenty-first century.

The dissolution of the Columbians presented an opportunity for one of their young disciples to set off on his own. Firebrand Jesse B. Stoner launched a movement that would make the Columbians look like a bunch of liberal do-gooders. For Stoner there was only one final two-pronged solution to the nation’s religious and racial problems: Death and Deportation.

6.

Death and Deportation

James Sheldon and Stetson Kennedy scarcely had time to celebrate their triumph over the Columbians. Within weeks, they and their counterparts at the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee were drawn into a new battle with a new set of opponents. Stepping out of jail, freed on bond after one of his many convictions, a defiant Emory Burke warned the slew of gathered reporters, “A few court cases are not going to stop this movement.” He was correct. Burke would return, but as the co-star rather than the leading man in the war for White Supremacy. That star turn would go to one of his Columbian apprentices, Jesse B. Stoner.¹

The collapse of the Columbians and suspension of the Ku Klux Klan’s charter in June 1947 proved advantageous for ambitious men such as Stoner. For several years, he had watched leaders from both groups build movements that were thwarted by government authorities and undercover operations conducted by the ADL and ANL. With both right-wing groups temporarily out of commission, the time was right for launching an even more aggressive religious and racial campaign.

Declaring his Stoner Anti-Jewish Party “one hundred percent for white supremacy,” the former Klansman and Columbian took the war against Jews and Blacks to new heights. Stoner’s party called for every Black man, woman, and child to be deported to Africa. As for Jews, rather than send them to Madagascar, as the Klan suggested, Stoner demanded their immediate extermination. “Just take them out and kill them. That may sound a little preposterous and extreme, but other countries have done it.” Once in power, his party would use “hanging, shooting, gas, electrocution, ‘and whatever seems most appropriate,’” to rid the nation of the Jewish menace once and for all.²

From 1942 until his death in 2005, Jesse Stoner waged a relentless war on behalf of White Supremacy. To this day, observed one historian, Stoner remains “an inspiration to a new generation of far-right activists” who revered him as “the patriarch of the White Supremacist movement.” No other nationalist leader of the second half of the twentieth century would start, partner with, and influence as many White Supremacist groups as the Tennessee firebrand.³

A childhood battle with polio left Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. with a lifelong limp and a chip on both shoulders. J. B., as he liked to be called, was born on April 13, 1924, in LaFayette, Georgia, the second of four children. His Southern-born parents, Jesse Sr. and Minnie Stoner, ran a successful Chattanooga-based sightseeing company that provided tours of nearby Lookout Mountain, site of celebratory Klan cross burnings. Stoner contracted polio as a two-year-old and suffered through an unsuccessful operation that severed his leg in three places and worsened his limp. As if his physical suffering was not enough, Jesse’s father died when he was five and his mother when he was seventeen. The family’s tour business did well enough that his mother was able to send her son to the McCallie School, a “first-class university school” in Chattanooga, where he enjoyed studying history.⁴

In recounting their paths to racism, White Supremacists like former Columbian Lanier Waller told of being taught to hate as a child. Not Stoner. He learned to hate all on his own. “I started taking an interest in politics and what was going on when I was about eight years old.” As a young middle-class boy growing up in Chattanooga, he claimed to have seen how Blacks repeatedly deceived whites by putting on a false front. “They say, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Yes, mam,’ when you tell them what to do, and if somebody cusses them out they used to say, ‘Thank you, boss.’ But I’ve always known that wasn’t their real attitude.” Young Stoner understood that Blacks held “a strong resentment and antagonism toward white people.” They hated him and he hated them.⁵

Stoner’s hatred also extended to the nation’s Jews. Stoner was convinced that “Jews were on the wrong side of every issue, and even when I was a child, I had enough brains to observe that.” His close observation of Black and Jewish behavior led him to see the latter as the manipulative masterminds behind the Civil Rights movement. Blacks, he insisted, simply “don’t have the brains or the power to do it.”⁶

As a young Southerner, Stoner was enamored of the racial ideas put forth by Theodore Bilbo, one of the South’s most outspoken segregationists and “the most anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi voice in the American Senate,” according to ADL leader Arnold Forster. Bilbo served two terms as governor of Mississippi (1916–1920 and 1928–1932) and as Mississippi senator from 1935 until his death in August 1947. A proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, Bilbo insisted that the United States was “strictly a white man’s country … and any dream on the part of the Negro Race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.” In April 1939, the Mississippi senator introduced a bill calling for the deportation of all African Americans to Liberia.⁷

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Jesse B. Stoner, KKK Kleagle (Florida Memory Project)

Adolf Hitler and the German nation also influenced Stoner’s lifelong struggle on behalf of White Supremacy. The Stoners were of German lineage, but as a neighbor told the FBI, “he was the only one of his family who expressed sympathy for Germany.” While in high school, the loner who participated in no activities told classmates how much he “admired Hitler and his regime.” He even wrote to Iowan Fred Kaltenbach, a Nazi sympathizer who broadcast programs on a Berlin shortwave station, asking if German doctors might be able to fix his limp—and was delighted when told that after the “present emergency” was over, “he could be cured by German scientists.”⁸

Stoner absorbed ideas gleaned from Bilbo and Hitler and spent the rest of his life putting them into practice. As early as high school, he began “preparing for [a career in] politics.” When the United States entered the war in December 1941, Stoner told classmates the United States was fighting on the wrong side: the real enemy was not Hitler and Nazism but the Jews and communists who threatened to destroy Western civilization.⁹

Stoner justified his lifelong hatred of Jews by embracing Christian Identity, a religious ideology tinged with antigovernment sentiments that has influenced White Supremacist groups well into the 2020s. Emerging in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, Christian Identity took hold in the United State during the 1930s and blossomed in the 1940s and ’50s under the leadership of Los Angeles–based ministers Gerald L. K. Smith and his gun-toting ally Dr. Wesley Swift. Christian Identity theology justified its embrace of nativism, antisemitism, and Aryan superiority by arguing that Jews were not God’s “chosen people.” Rather, they were the spawn of the Devil, the children of an illicit sexual relationship between Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Aryans were the godly descendants of Adam and Eve, and the blood offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—making them, not the Jews, the true children of the ancient Israelites. Blacks, Asians, and people of color held a lower status than Jews and were referred to as less-than-human “mud people.”¹⁰

Christian Identity proved a powerful tool for postwar antisemites and White Supremacists for it combined “a contemporary appeal to white supremacism with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of Christian anti-Semitism.” For true believers, there could be no compromise with Jews or Blacks because this was a death battle for the survival of the white race. As Wesley Swift told his congregation in the early 1950s, “All Jews must be destroyed. I prophesize that before November 1953 there will not be a Jew in the United States and by that I mean a Jew that will be able to walk or talk.” Stoner came to a similar conclusion nearly a decade earlier. In 1944, he petitioned Congress to pass a resolution declaring that “Jews are children of the Devil, and that, consequently, they constitute a great menace to the United States of America.”¹¹

Stoner’s family was horrified by his racial and religious views and ostracized him throughout his adult life. His aunt Sara Stoner, his sole familial contact, thought her nephew had a brilliant but “warped mind” and “[would] probably end up in the penitentiary.” Her efforts to persuade him to abandon his activities proved fruitless. J. B. survived by selling copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a fabricated antisemitic document published in Russia in 1903 that accused Jews of plotting global domination—for two dollars each and receiving regular monthly stipends from his deceased parents’ estate. J. B. “spends every cent of it and can’t account for any of it,” his aunt reported. None of the money was spent on girlfriends or boyfriends. Stoner remained a lifelong bachelor, insisting that “no woman [was] smart enough” for him.¹²

Determined to spend his life combating Jews and Blacks, Stoner began his career in hate shortly after his mother’s death in 1941, when he founded the Chattanooga chapter of the pro-Nazi America First committee. Once the United States entered the war, the high school senior organized Chattanooga’s Klavern No. 317. Elected grand wizard by fellow Klansmen, eighteen-year-old Stoner began holding meetings that attracted upwards of 200 people. “The Democratic and Republic parties,” he explained, “don’t offer the American people anything but more Jewism.” In 1942, Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard James Colescott appointed the troubled but charismatic youth Kleagle (chief recruiter) for Tennessee, the youngest man to hold such a high Klan office.¹³

The end of World War II presented the man “with a psychopathic hatred of Jews,” as the ADL’s Arnold Forster noted, with an opportunity to launch a new war against Jews and Blacks. Proving himself a man of action, he began with small acts of terror meant to have an oversized effect. In a show of patriotic unity, the Klan had agreed to halt cross burning for the duration of the war, but not Stoner. He resumed burning crosses in Black and Jewish neighborhoods in late 1944 and continued his fiery warnings throughout the next year. He celebrated war’s end with an elaborate cross burning in downtown Chattanooga and urged returning veterans “to do something about the ‘n__ns’ who got all the good jobs while you were in uniform.” Many of those veterans joined Stoner’s “vigilante squads,” which vowed to protect Chattanooga’s white citizens.¹⁴

Stoner and his allies let the city’s Jews know they were not welcome. When Mrs. Kate Robbins, a Jew, purchased a dry goods store, five men dressed in Klan regalia burned a fiery cross next to her business. One Klansman asked if she knew what the cross-burning meant. When she did not reply, he spat out, “It means we don’t want any Jews.” Four days later, Robbins found a note attached to the doorknob of her store that read, “We mean business—we don’t want any Jews here. KKK.” She sold her store.¹⁵

James Sheldon and Arnold Forster learned about Stoner’s activities from their shared undercover operative, Stetson Kennedy. While posing as John Perkins, Kennedy traveled to Chattanooga in December 1945 to interview the blazing young orator for the Southern Outlook. It would be the first of five interviews, for no other nationalist leader so fascinated and frightened the usually unflappable Kennedy as much as the diminutive Tennessee “führer.”

Arriving at room 204 in the Temple Court building on December 12, 1945, Perkins/Kennedy was admitted to Stoner’s office “by a tough-looking, quasimoronic fellow about twenty-eight years old who introduced me to Stoner.” The Klan leader, Kennedy observed, “walks as though he might have an artificial leg; he has close-cropped hair; and averted his eyes ceilingward at intervals of about thirty seconds throughout our conversation, which lasted many hours.” During their interview, the young firebrand laid out a series of ideas he would maintain for the next sixty years. “I am the youngest organizer the Klan has. I’m twenty-one now and I started organizing when I was nineteen.” Explaining his views on race, Stoner insisted, “I believe in white supremacy—social, political, and economic. You can’t give niggers any economic gains unless you want to give them social equality.” Stoner blamed the Jews “for egging them on” to demand their so-called rights. “If they keep on like they’re going, there is going to be violence, and we won’t be the ones to start it.”¹⁶

Stoner was happy to send Blacks back to Africa, but not the Jews. As far as he was concerned, the world would be a better place if all Jews were dead. Echoing his own version of Christian Identity, Stoner told Kennedy, “I don’t mind saying I’m anti-Jewish. I’ve finished a book based on the Bible alone, showing that the Jews are Satanic. I think Christians ought to be fanatically anti-Jewish; no Christian ought to be tolerant of Jews. They want to destroy our race.” Exhibiting a modicum of perverse empathy for “Jew devils,” Stoner insisted “we ought to kill all the Jews just to save their unborn generations from having to go to hell. All they do is try to keep people from coming to Christ. It is better for the Jews to die than for others to go to hell.”¹⁷

To keep America white, Stoner called on the government to halt all immigration except for pure Aryans. “I don’t want racial equality in any form—whether with Negroes, Japs, Chinese, Filipino, or what have you.”¹⁸

Like many self-proclaimed nationalists, Stoner considered himself a patriotic Christian warrior and man of action. He planned to launch the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party in 1946 and expected to attract a “new generation” of supporters from recently returned servicemen. These men, he told Kennedy, were angered by the detrimental changes that had occurred on the home front while they were off fighting for their country. Stoner boasted of having already recruited members from Tennessee, Texas, Illinois, New York, and Canada.¹⁹

Kennedy came away from their first encounter convinced that “this guy must be stark, raving crazy.” Klan Grand Dragon Samuel Green did not think Stoner was crazy but, fearing his ideas would hurt Klan recruiting efforts, he fired the Tennessee Kleagle “for being too radical” in his religious and racial views. Green knew that praising Hitler and calling for the mass extermination of Jews on American soil, after citizens had learned about Nazi death camps like Auschwitz, would likely turn potential supporters against the Klan.²⁰

When Kennedy learned about the firing, he returned to Chattanooga to interview Stoner in June 1946. The former Klan leader was “visibly upset for some time, protesting against the use of the word radical to describe his anti-Jewism.” The word radical, Stoner told Kennedy, should be reserved for “left-wingers.” Like Emory Burke and Homer Loomis Jr., he thought Green and current Klan leaders were too timid in their racial and religious policies. Green “will attack Jews on an individual basis, but will not go along in attacking them as a group. He is not really anti-Jewish.”²¹

Stoner explained how he had coined the phrase “anti-Jewism” because “very few people” in the South understood the term antisemitism. Anti-Jewism, he insisted, was “a leading Christian virtue.” Once people understood this, they would undoubtedly support his party’s demand that “the Jewish race should be lawfully exterminated with the exception of any Jews that can prove they are really Christians.” Hoping to popularize “Down with the Jews!” as a substitute for “Yours Truly,” he made a rubber stamp with that phrase which he used on all correspondence.²²

Stoner considered himself an intellectual as well as a political leader. He planned to enlighten the public with a pamphlet, The Gospel of Jesus Christ versus the Jews: Christianity’s Attitude toward the Jews as Explained by the Holy Bible, that would explain his radical ideas about anti-Jewism and why Christian Identity theology demanded their permanent removal from American soil. Unlike Christians who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, Jews were “Satanically insane” for spurning God’s son and would be punished for their infidelity. He published his fifty-eight-page tract in 1946 and followed it with several more works explaining God’s justification for his ideas: The Jewish Ritual Murders, The Talmud Unmasked, Christ Not a Jew and Jews Not God’s Chosen People, and Crusade Against Corruption.²³

Stoner loved publicity, even the negative kind. Journalists across the nation were captivated by a character whose racial views were too extreme for the Ku Klux Klan. His aunt recalled that after influential political columnist Drew Pearson denounced Stoner in May 1946, “J. B. was literally walking on air for days, enjoying his notoriety.” Stoner was delighted to describe his solution to the Jewish problem to Atlanta Constitution reporter Jim Furniss. The “intense, pimply-faced young man” with “close cropped-hair and red-rimmed eyes,” the reporter wrote that July, “is systematically planning the mass murder of human beings on a scale which makes Nazi Germany seem like a haven for the oppressed by comparison.” Insisting that “Hitler was too moderate,” Stoner promised to be “more modern about it,” using gas, electric chairs, shootings, hangings to eliminate the nation’s Jews as quickly as possible. Blacks would be relocated to Africa, “where we can send them some Cadillacs and make them all happy.”²⁴

Despite the seeming insanity of Stoner’s plan, Furniss warned citizens not to underestimate the former Klan Kleagle. Stoner was “possessed of a shrewd, quick mind” and “learned much from his association with Klan officials and his career as a Klan organizer.” He had already succeeded in persuading militant Klansmen to join the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party. As journalists across the country began taking Stoner seriously, articles appeared in newspapers alerting readers to his deadly plans for minorities.²⁵

Stoner’s radical ideas elicited dire warnings from the Black and Jewish press. “Fascism is still with us as a real, live menace,” Earl Conrad wrote in the African American Chicago Defender in October 1946. “Adolph [sic] may be dead but his hulking corpse walks about in Chattanooga, Atlanta, New York and elsewhere.” Neither Blacks nor Jews could depend on the FBI for help. “Mr. Hoover is so busy running around the country making his anti-labor, anti-left-wing speeches that outfits like Stoner’s get the encouragement of silence.” The Anti-Defamation League Bulletin and Washington News Letter told readers how “the boy wonder of hate, is out to make Hitler look like a sissy in his persecution of the Jews.” Stoner had “a shrewd animal cunning” and “his meteoric rise in the southern hate campaign” had many believing he could run Klan leader Samuel Green out of office and out of the limelight whenever he wished.”²⁶

Just as Hitler built his brownshirt army in the 1920s from among disgruntled veterans, so, too, did Stoner appeal to poor disgruntled Southern workers. Like the Columbians, he criticized the Klan for pursuing the interests of its middle and professional class members, while ignoring millions of distressed white workers who found themselves competing with Blacks for jobs and inexpensive housing. He pointed out that Southern industrial workers earned $865 annually compared to their Northern counterparts, who earned $1,219. The Klan did nothing to remedy that imbalance, but Stoner would. He promised to exclude any government employees or businessmen from his party, preferring to “limit membership to working class people.”²⁷

Stoner offered the poorest and least educated Southerners an economic plan that promised a better future. He boasted to “John Perkins” that his party’s call for “Mass production and High Wages” was attracting working-class whites ignored by the Klan. The KKK, Stoner argued, “is effective up to a certain point, but the need is for a political party to get rid of all the Jews and send all the niggers back to Africa.” Many of his party’s initial members were veterans who belonged to unions. Stoner supported unions, but “without Jews or niggers, of course.” Tennessee workers responded favorably to his new party. “Stoner’s no crack pot,” said one sympathetic mule breeder. “He means business.” Ordinary workingmen, he added, admired his determination to keep Blacks “in their place.”²⁸

Stoner’s party pledged not to mistreat anybody except for Jews. “Chopping off the heads of all Jews would not be a mistreatment, considering their sins against Christ.” He also pledged to introduce a constitutional amendment limiting freedom of religion to “Christian religions.” Any religious group “not recognizing the divinity of Jesus Christ would be punished.” In addition to killing Jews and deporting Blacks, he proposed sending “Orientals to the Orient.” Pledging to maintain God-fearing Christian homes throughout the nation, his party considered sexual intercourse outside of marriage a sin and a crime and would outlaw divorce.²⁹

Stoner envisioned a radically different postwar political world. In August 1945, he invited several trusted Klansmen to his home to discuss creating a “national anti-Jewish party” that would run former North Carolina senator and American Nationalist Party founder Robert Reynolds as its presidential candidate in 1948. To promote their cause, the group decided to form “storm trooper gangs” composed of unemployed ex-servicemen who would incite “Christians against Jews and white workers against Negroes.” They would make sure that no Black man or woman would dare vote in elections. Reynolds’s potential candidacy ended when ADL officials presented him with proof that his support was coming from pro-Nazi hate groups throughout the country. Foiled on one front, Stoner planned to run a slate of presidential electors on his party’s ticket in 1948 with the idea of throwing a close electoral college vote “to the most anti-Jewish candidate.”³⁰

Stoner’s party failed to evolve as quickly as he hoped because it was soon overshadowed by the Columbians. Stoner considered Emory Burke and Homer Loomis Jr. far greater warriors for White Supremacy than Klan Grand Dragon Samuel Green. He admired their determination to face down Jews from New York and Georgia officials who sold out their race. The twenty-two-year-old joined the Columbians to see what he could learn. Over the next year, Stoner formed a close friendship with Burke that lasted for decades.

Using his trust fund to finance his activities, Stoner traveled to Atlanta to attend several meetings and rallies. Addressing Atlanta Klavern No. 1 in July 1946, he denounced Green’s tolerance of Jews and implored fellow Klansmen to help get “all Jews out of our country” by joining his soon-to-be launched party that would “out-Hitler Hitler.”³¹

Stoner joined the Columbians hoping to learn political strategies from Burke and Loomis. “Anti-Jewites cannot operate within the Democratic and Republican parties,” he wrote Burke in November 1946, “so must form parties of their own.” Just as Stoner was impressed by Burke and Loomis, so, too, were they impressed by him. The young radical’s most important contribution to the Columbian cause came during the contentious evening meeting of October 31, when Columbians clashed with Jewish war veterans. Stoner was the one who advised Burke and Loomis that they could thwart Dan Duke’s efforts to revoke their charter simply by tearing it up and declaring themselves the Columbian Party—which is precisely what Burke did.³²

The Columbians ultimately failed, but Stoner learned a valuable political lesson from Burke and Loomis: if you are a movement activist committed to a lifelong battle for White Supremacy, after suffering a defeat you need to swallow your ego and join with more successful individuals or organizations that share your ideas and commitment. In February 1947, with Burke and Loomis facing months if not years of court battles, Stoner proposed merging the membership of Columbians and his Anti-Jewish party. He was ready to defer to the two Columbians, but they were not ready to partner with Stoner. Burke and Loomis believed in the importance of forging coalitions, but rather than join with the enthusiastic but inexperienced Stoner, they spent much of the time during their endless court battles working for the nation’s most prominent postwar antisemite, Gerald L. K. Smith.³³

Stoner may have been disappointed with Burke and Loomis’s decision, but he was smart enough to observe and learn from their actions as they traveled the country, working with Smith and forging coalitions with men and women who shared a common vision of the American future. Stoner marveled at Smith’s brilliant use of newspapers, radio, and later television to promote his cause. He would later employ what he learned from Smith to further his own career in hate.

Clergyman, politician, fascist, Nazi sympathizer, and rabid anticommunist, Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith supplanted “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin as the nation’s leading postwar antisemite. Born in Wisconsin in 1898 and ordained as a minister in 1916, Smith began his political activism in the 1930s, working closely with William Dudley Pelley, founder of the fascist Silver Shirts, the American version of Hitler’s brownshirts. In 1942, he launched the Christian Nationalist Crusade and The Cross and the Flag, a racist and antisemitic periodical with a mailing list of 20,000 in 1944, 200,000 in 1949, and 3 million by 1960. In 1943, Smith founded the America First Party, the political offshoot of the America First movement that Stoner had joined before the war. Following an unsuccessful run for president in 1944, he changed the party’s name to the Christian Nationalist Party and set up headquarters in Detroit.³⁴

Smith’s various organizations shared a common denominator: an unbridled hatred of Jews and Blacks and the use of Christian Identity to defend his position. He told followers of hearing a “call” from God in 1933 and again in 1942 “to save Christian America from the invasion of the enemies of Christ.” There was no doubt who those enemies were: the people who killed Christ and refused to accept him as the son of God, the Jews. Smith considered Blacks a “child race only 200 years out of cannibalism,” who were being secretly controlled by Jews. “Anyone knows that the poor Negro is not smart enough or natively evil enough to be victorious over us.” Southerners would never be truly free until they realized that the Jews stood behind the Negros’ calls for civil rights and integration. “Ten million white people,” he warned potential supporters, would be “driven from their homes to make room for the Black Communist Soviet.” To remedy this, Smith demanded the complete segregation of the Black and white races “because that’s the only way we can survive as the leader of Christian Civilization.”³⁵

In March 1947 Smith launched a 20,000-mile “Southern Tour” and invited the embattled Emory Burke and Homer Loomis Jr. to join him. Many poor Southern whites considered the two men inspirational figures, so Smith wanted them by his side. The Columbians accepted the minister’s offer for two reasons: they desperately needed the cash he offered them, and they hoped to rebuild their Southern base by allying with Smith’s movement.

Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade began with meetings in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama and was set to culminate with a rally of 25,000 at Douglas, Georgia. But there was one problem. The AJC, ADL, and ANL had all placed spies inside Smith’s organization. In a rare moment of unity, the three groups, acting in concert with local civic, religious, and veterans’ groups, convinced Douglas officials to ban Smith from holding meetings at any public facility or church. Smith ended his tour by preaching to seventy-five people at tiny Reedy Branch Baptist Church in rural Bloxton, ten miles from Douglas.³⁶

While Burke and Loomis were busy working with Smith, Stoner began circulating Anti-Jewish Party postcards through the mail. “If our great and beloved America is to live,” one card read, “Jewry must die and the Jewish race must cease to exist.” Alexander Miller, the ADL’s Southern Region director, filed a lawsuit charging Stoner with violating federal laws that prohibited sending mail that incited murder or assassination. After an unfavorable court decision, Stoner ceased distributing his postcards and shifted his energies to joining a new coalition that would reorient Southern politics.³⁷

On July 14, 1948, Southern segregationists, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor and the Alabama and Mississippi delegations, reacted to President Harry Truman’s civil rights program by walking out of the Democratic Party convention. Truman’s liberal policies, observed Georgia Attorney General Eugene Cook, had “accelerated the Klan’s growth more than anything since Reconstruction.” Like many delegates, Stoner considered Truman a traitor to his race and demanded Congress impeach him “for betraying America to the Jews.” Three days later, on July 17, 6,000 angry Dixiecrat dissenters met in Birmingham, Alabama, and founded the States’ Rights Democratic Party. Gerald Smith, who attended the meeting accompanied by “200 of his whirling dervishes,” promised his supporters would vote Dixiecrat because “the Negro and the Jew are exerting too much control in American politics.” Vowing to preserve segregation, the party nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate.³⁸ Thurmond carried four states, receiving 1.8 million popular votes and 39 electoral votes.

Stoner was convinced he was the man to lead the new war for White Supremacy. But others did not see him as ready to assume a major leadership role. Swallowing his ego yet again, he attended the convention and joined in planning party strategy. To convince his allies of his political clout, Stoner ran for Congress on the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party in Tennessee’s third congressional district. He received only 541 of the 30,000 votes cast.³⁹

The failure of Stoner’s campaign forced him to reconsider his future. He tried rejoining the Chattanooga Klan in December 1949 but was banished a month later after making a motion to expel all Jews from Chattanooga. Stoner needed another course of action. Vowing never again to be foiled by Jewish legal maneuvers, he moved to Atlanta in 1950 and enrolled in Atlanta Law School, a private evening law school founded in 1890 for working professionals. Studying at night, Stoner spent his days working as an insurance claims adjuster while living at the local YMCA. A prominent Atlanta judge who taught Stoner at law school described him as having a brilliant mind when it came to dealing with complicated legal matters.⁴⁰

The first-year law student was delighted to discover that his classmates included former Columbian Edward Fields. Stoner was a Protestant and Fields a Catholic, but those differences did not matter when it came to fighting Jews. Stoner had seen how much of Smith’s success came from positioning himself as a faithful warrior for Christ rather than as a violent antisemite. In 1952, following graduation and admission to the Georgia bar, he and Fields teamed up to create the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. It would be the beginning of a political relationship that lasted into the 1990s. It was also the moment when Stoner adopted a signature look that he maintained for the next forty years: hair cropped short and an ever-present bow tie and white shirt to give him an aura of respectability.⁴¹

With Smith’s Southern crusade stymied and the Columbians all but dead, Stoner and Fields used their time in law school to plan a new movement that would make the Klan look like a bunch of New York leftists. The Invisible Empire had gotten too soft, Stoner complained. It was “Jewish-controlled now and we don’t trust it.” Knowing he could use help, he turned to the more experienced Emory Burke for advice. Throughout his numerous court battles, the cofounder of the Columbians maintained close contact with prominent nationalists such as Smith, George Deatherage, and George Van Horn Moseley, men who could help Stoner’s new endeavor with money and mailing lists.⁴²

Burke entered jail on April 25, 1950, determined to continue battling on behalf of White Supremacy. Released in the fall of 1951, he temporarily moved in with Stoner and his roommate, Emmet O’Neil Morris, a typesetter at the Atlanta Constitution who shared Stoner’s longtime admiration for Hitler and Nazi Germany. On October 11, 1952, eight months after Stoner’s admission to the Georgia bar, he, Burke, and Fields arranged for “several subversive groups” to meet at Burke’s new home in nearby Decatur to discuss forming the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. Like the Columbians, Stoner would first try the ballot; if that did not work, then the bullet—or, in his case, bombs.⁴³

Stoner began by sending out postcards and party pamphlets, and stapling “Hate-the-Jew” cards to Governor Herman Talmadge’s campaign literature. He then placed the material on every porch in the city’s white neighborhoods. Hoping to build a national constituency, Stoner also sent his propaganda to individuals and groups in twenty states and Washington, D.C.⁴⁴

When Atlantans opened their mailboxes just before Halloween, they found a postcard with a title in bold print declaring, FREE AMERICA FROM THE JEWS. Playing upon a strain of Cold War antisemitism that linked Jews to so-called godless communists and their efforts to destroy Christianity and Western civilization, the postcard declared that “Revolutions, wars, internationalism, economic chaos. Inflations, starvations, unemployment and depressions” were “designed by the Jews to promote their communistic conspiracy.” But there was hope. True patriots who believed in “anti-Jewism, American Independence, the White Race and its Preservation, Liberty, Private Property, Freedom” could save the nation by paying a fifteen-dollar initiation fee (five dollars for those under twenty-one) and joining the Christian Anti-Jewish Party.⁴⁵

[picture]

Jews Behind Race Mixing (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Stoner’s mailings were condemned by a wide range of Atlanta residents. Columbia Theological Seminary President J. McDowell Richards echoed the sentiments of the city’s diverse clergy when he told a local reporter, “I consider the anti-Semitic card the work of Hitlerism at its worst … and it cannot be too vigorously opposed.” Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill contemptuously referred to the five-foot-six-Stoner and his supporters as “pygmy Hitlers” who proposed going “further than Hitler and Goebbels.” Even famed bandleader Duke Ellington weighed in on Stoner’s racism. In a column for the Baltimore Afro-American, he declared his commitment to fighting Southern segregation and mocked Stoner’s generous pledge to send Blacks to Africa and offer every one a Cadillac.⁴⁶

After receiving numerous complaints from local residents about the hate-ridden flyers in their mail, FBI offices in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Chattanooga finally opened a file on Stoner and his party—some seven years after the ANL’s James Sheldon and the ADL’s Arnold Forster had. But unlike the New York-based groups, the FBI ran no undercover operation during these years. Their information about Stoner and his allies consisted largely of newspaper clippings and questionable information from informants, many of whom often got their basic facts wrong.⁴⁷

Stoner’s genius and lasting influence lay in his ability to take a doctrine preached by religious leaders and turn it into a vehicle for political action. After watching the success of Gerald Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade, Stoner adapted Christian Identity as the fulcrum for his newly renamed party. Committed white Christians, Stoner told potential supporters, had no choice but to serve God and his true “Chosen People.” In so doing, Stoner anticipated a strategy that would be used decades later by right-wing militia groups such as the Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus, and Sovereign Citizens. None believed they were prejudiced. In their minds, they were just stating truths that any right-minded Christian would agree with.

For Stoner and his followers, God and country were inseparable. “The Holy Bible says we Christians are God’s Chosen People, not the Jews.” Citing Thessalonians 2:14–6 and St. John 8:44–48 as proof of God’s will, party flyers insisted that “Christianity is the true religion. It has only been successful in White nations. Therefore, we Christians should work hard to Preserve the White Race. The White Race is the builder of Civilization, so we do not let race mixing kill it. The Jews have destroyed Racial Separation.” Another mailing explained how “Anti-Jewism is a leading Christian virtue and an essential American virtue. Our party believes in Anti-Jewism. Anti-Jewism says that America rightfully belongs to us Americans, not to the Jews; Jew-devils have no place in a Christian Country.” Stoner reminded potential constituents that “people that support the Jews are followers of Judas Iscariot.”⁴⁸

The Christian Anti-Jewish party declared as its dual goals “destroying Communism” and “Freeing America from the Jews.” Subsequent flyers proclaimed: “Without the Jews there would be no Communism,” “The Jews have our money and we want it back,” and “Jew-devils have no place in a Christian country.”⁴⁹

His party hoped to attract national support by promising significant social and material benefits for every white American, something the Ku Klux Klan had failed to provide. Once in power, he would make segregation the law of the land. “Your children will never have to go to school with blacks … White People will Never Mix with blacks in Churches, Marriages, Restaurants, Hotels, Busses, Trains, Rest Rooms, Dances, Parks, Swimming Pools, Beaches, or Anywhere else. Our solution is 100% legal. We will amend the Constitution so only White Gentiles can live in America.” Unlike the Klan, which excluded Catholics from their organization, Stoner declared “All White People eligible, Protestant and Catholics.” Focusing mainly on racial issues, Stoner’s party also promised jobs that paid well: “White jobs for Whites only! White men and women must not be forced to work with blacks or under black bosses. No Company should be forced to hire blacks.” The nation’s working-class whites would also benefit economically from the party’s demand for substantial old-age pensions and lower taxes.⁵⁰

Stoner’s greatest appeal in attracting voters was simple yet powerful: his party vowed to “confiscate [Jews’] ill-gotten wealth for the benefit of the American people.” Tempering his earlier messages, Stoner now offered Jews an alternative to immediate extermination: deportation to Palestine. They could leave the country alive, but without their money. Once that happened, Christians would no longer “suffer poverty in a rich land of plenty while the hoggish Jews wallow in luxury.” His party would ensure that “Money, gold, businesses and property that the Jews unrighteously possess will be legally taken by the United States Government and given to us.” With the Jews gone, every “American [would] have an opportunity to earn a fortune or decent living in this bountiful Land of ours.”⁵¹

Giving himself the title “Arch leader,” Stoner adopted Hitler’s Führerprinzip of absolute obedience. Those joining his party had to recognize Stoner’s “authority as being full and unlimited.” That included the “complete and unrestricted right” to control the party and its finances as he saw fit. To expand their base, members were required to bring fifty new supporters to every election. They also swore not to believe the false news put out by “lying Jew-controlled newspapers.” Those wishing to join were urged to sign a membership form and send it to Edward Fields, the party’s chief secretary, in Atlanta.⁵²

The Christian Anti-Jewish Party failed to attract the initial level of support Stoner had hoped. But he did attract many enemies. Shortly before midnight on March 30, 1953, someone poured gasoline under the door of his apartment on Currier Street, lit it, and then fled as the apartment ignited in flames. Everyone attending the late-night meeting escaped unharmed, but a subsequent FBI investigation found that the gas can used to ignite the fire came from a nearby “Negro service station.”⁵³

Jesse Stoner believed his two anti-Jewish parties could save the nation. But like the Columbians, he was overly optimistic. Stoner and the Columbians believed they could lure vast numbers of poor working-class voters with promises of a better economic future. But unlike the two mainstream parties they condemned, they had no substantial economic or foreign policies that looked to the future. They offered no specific programs to create more jobs and housing or deal with rising inflation and issues created by postwar immigration. Instead, Stoner, Burke, and Loomis engaged in magical thinking: get rid of the nation’s internal enemies—Blacks and Jews—and miraculously, everything will be better, and all Christians will be wealthy.

Neither party realized how much the presence of men in Nazi uniforms just a few years after Hitler’s defeat would offend potential supporters. In the end, their racism and antisemitism blinded them to more effective ways to obtain political power. But Stoner, Burke, and Loomis struggled on, convinced that one day they could persuade voters to believe in simplistic solutions to extraordinarily complicated problems.

Despite his setbacks, Stoner remained undeterred. He wanted to be more than a regional leader; he wanted to create a national party. But to do so, he and Fields needed to expand their base into the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. In August 1953, the two men decided to seek out new allies and policies by attending an annual convention of nationalist groups being held in Chicago. But before then, they traveled to New York City to meet the man who fashioned himself as the great American führer, James Hartung Madole. Fields and Burke had been corresponding with the leader of the National Renaissance Party since 1949 and found him even bolder than Stoner. It was one thing to call for death to Jews in Chattanooga or Atlanta, but quite another thing to do it in the streets in New York City, the capital of Jewish America. “I am proud of being a Fascist and a Nazi,” Madole told a crowd in 1953. “[The Jews] have got to get the same concentration camps as they got in Germany and Italy. We’ve got to get rid of them, the sooner the better.”⁵⁴

Stoner and Fields looked forward to meeting the man who was even more outspoken in his hatred of Jews than they were. They knew that Madole’s National Renaissance Bulletin was the most important Nazi periodical in the nation. Forging an alliance with him would also connect them to Nazis and fascists throughout the world. The opportunity was too good to pass up. They would go to New York and see what could be done.

PART II

NAZIS IN NEW YORK

7.

“Kill the Jews, Save the White Race”¹

Arriving in New York in late August 1953, Jesse Stoner and Edward Fields could not have been happier with the man National Renaissance Party (NRP) führer James Madole assigned as their guide. Mana Truhill, whom the Anti-Defamation League described as “a noisy extrovert who likes to affect German military airs,” greeted his Southern compatriots dressed in the NRP’s Nazi-like storm trooper’s uniform: khaki shirt, black tie, black trousers, black cap, and an armband that featured a blue lightning bolt within a white circle on a field of red.²

If Stoner and Fields thought Truhill’s outfit looked familiar, they were correct. Madole copied the Columbians’ uniform, adding only his own insignia inside the armband. The NRP leader had long admired the now defunct Atlanta group. He met Homer Loomis Jr. and Ira Jett when they went north in 1949 looking for money and weapons, and then Emory Burke when he visited the city a year later raising funds for his defense.³

The two Christian Anti-Jewish Party leaders told Truhill they were traveling to Chicago to attend an annual nationalist convention “that all the Nazis in the United States are on their way to.” They stopped in New York hoping to forge an alliance with Madole and his growing Nazi party. Stoner knew that he and Madole shared similar ideas about Jews and Blacks. He had heard how the courageous New York Nazi stood on the corner of York Avenue between East Eighty-Sixth and Eighty-Seventh Streets each week—in the heart of New York’s German American community—boldly calling for death to all Jews. “My followers demand the destruction of Jewry,” Madole explained, “and I have advised them to continue in that demand.”⁴

Just as Stoner admired Madole, so, too, did Madole admire Stoner. Madole had been following Stoner’s rise to prominence and hoped to extend the NRP’s influence into the Deep South by allying with the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. He had been corresponding with Fields since 1949 and now welcomed the opportunity to meet him and Stoner in person. To that end, he asked Truhill to show the two visitors a good time.

Even the most serious political die-hards enjoy an evening of fun—and that included Stoner and Fields. Meeting them at 8:00 P.M. on August 23, Truhill was struck by the stark physical contrast between the two fascists. Six-foot-tall Edward Fields was “quite a good-looking young man” and a bit of a dandy who sported an elaborately pomaded ducktail similar to that worn by teen heartthrob James Dean. The more rotund Stoner was several years older, half a foot shorter, walked with a severe limp, and preferred a more conservative look: close-cropped hair, a bow tie, and a white shirt. The two men also differed in their choice of entertainment. Much to Stoner’s dismay, Fields asked Truhill to take them to “a girly show” on Forty-Second Street. “That kind of show is not for me,” Truhill observed, but Fields “seemed to love it.” Afterward, the trio went barhopping and finally called it a night around 3:00 A.M. As they said goodbye, Truhill invited the pair to stay with him the next time they came to New York.⁵

[picture]

Mana Truhill (Emmanuel Trujillo) in Nazi uniform to right of H. Keith Thompson, American agent for Germany’s neo-Nazi Socialist Reich party (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

The two men left for Chicago the next day, unaware that the man they had spent the evening with, Mana Truhill, was in fact a pseudonym for James Sheldon’s most highly placed spy, Emmanuel Trujillo. Returning to his apartment at 3:30 A.M., an exhausted Truhill/Trujillo wrote Sheldon a memo describing his impressions of the two Southerners. Fields “is full of hate but has no idea why … It’s a shame that his mind is so messed up … The more I talk to Fields, the more sure I am that there is someone a lot older and smarter” in charge, someone like Stoner.⁶

James H. Madole and Jesse B. Stoner each envisioned himself as the leader of a united fascist movement, with one key difference. While Stoner looked to forge a broad American coalition, Madole positioned the NRP to become the center of a postwar movement that would join fascists and Nazis throughout the world in a powerful international alliance. For the next three decades, Madole and Stoner helped each other whenever they could, but always saw the other as a rival for national prominence.

At first glance, James Hartung Madole could have been mistaken for a minister or college professor. Craving respectability, he often wore a white shirt, a close-fitting suit jacket with three buttons fastened, and thick horn-rimmed glasses. But there was nothing respectable about his goals. Like Stoner, he proposed to send all Blacks back to Africa. As for Jews, Madole’s storm troopers posted NRP stickers on city walls, telephone poles, and public spaces calling on supporters to KILL THE JEWS, SAVE THE WHITE RACE.”⁷

Compared to the Ku Klux Klan, the NRP might appear as little more than a minor local nuisance. After all, the party’s paid membership never totaled more than a few thousand at best. Yet, James Sheldon and his counterparts at the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee understood that Madole’s decades-long efforts to forge an international fascist front posed a far greater threat to democracy than the Klan, Columbians, or Christian Anti-Jewish Party. “One of the greatest dangers of our time,” Sheldon warned in April 1947, was the “regrowth of fascist power in Germany” and the “existence of a carefully organized, well-planned and fairly well financed underground pro-German movement, in the United States” that threatened “to bring the world once again to the edge of abyss.” George Mintzer, director of AJC undercover operations, also cautioned that Nazis “who were either in prison or detention camps during the war” or had fled Germany were now trying to revive Hitler’s dream and rid the world of the Jewish menace once and for all. And they were being helped by fascist and Nazi revivals in France and Spain.⁸

The National Renaissance Party was a key part of that international organizing effort.

Madole’s National Renaissance Bulletin (NR Bulletin), launched in January 1949, served as the most important fascist media outlet of its time. Right below its masthead was a quote from Adolf Hitler rejecting democracy and calling for a party built “upon the idea of personality” rather than the will “of the majority.” Like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, the dark web, and similar social media networks, the NR Bulletin connected many of the world’s leading Nazis through its articles and advertisements. More importantly, Nazi leaders scattered around the world wrote to the NRP’s overseas director for information they could not ask for in public: requests for trusted contacts, weapons, and money needed to promote their movements in Germany, Spain, Argentina, Sweden, and elsewhere. Even the FBI, which tended to downplay antisemitic threats, warned that the “NRP could be part of a large worldwide plan to discredit the present German government and hinder the U.S. State Department in its plans for unification of Western Europe.”⁹

By 1949, the ANL and ADL had succeeded in destroying the Columbians and stalling the Klan’s growth. But they now faced an even greater threat. They, and the American Jewish Committee, refused to stand by while Madole and his allies fought to revive a worldwide Nazi alliance. Nor would they tolerate uniformed American Nazis openly calling for death to Jews in the city that housed more Jewish Holocaust survivors than anywhere in the nation. They knew that Madole’s vision of a violently antisemitic America was not an unreasonable fantasy. Attacks on American Jews rose by 50 percent between 1946 and 1947. Antisemitic threats from abroad proved equally worrisome. According to a 1947 poll, 60 percent of Germans were still “deeply infected with hatred, while only 2 percent were strongly opposed to anti-Jewish feelings. Indeed, 18 percent of the Germans were so violently anti-Jewish that they still would bar Jews from restaurants and would prohibit marriage between Germans and ‘non-Aryans.’”¹⁰

Determined to stop a Nazi revival before it was too late, all three Jewish “self-defense” agencies assigned agents to spy on Madole. When it came to confronting Nazis in their home city, the American Jewish Committee abandoned its usual caution and took the early lead in investigating Madole and his allies. Since the late 1930s, George Mintzer, head of its Investigative and Fact-Finding Division, had been receiving information about racist and antisemitic activities from the AJC’s eleven regional offices and from volunteers in forty-one chapters spread throughout the country.¹¹

Born in Poland in 1898 and raised on New York’s Lower East Side, George Mintzer worked his way through City College, from which he graduated at eighteen, and then Fordham University School of Law. After several years of prosecuting loan sharks, counterfeiters, and drug smugglers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, he went to work for the AJC in 1939 running surveillance of Nazis, fascists, and nationalist groups. He proved so successful in “exposing subversive elements” during the war that the U.S. Army awarded him a special Certificate of Merit.¹²

Worried that the “international conspiracy will be resumed unless steps are taken to thwart it,” Mintzer hired famed private detective Abraham Shoenfeld in 1948 to run local undercover operations—which he did until 1964. Shoenfeld had worked for the AJC in 1938, spying on domestic Nazis. He returned to active spying a decade later at an annual salary of $9,100 ($121,231 in 2024 dollars). To shield the AJC from right-wing critics who accused the “Jewish Gestapo” of spying on innocent Christians, Mintzer created plausible deniability by employing Shoenfeld as a private contractor. It would be up to the fifty-seven-year-old detective to hire and supervise his own spies. “Neither [Shoenfeld] nor any member of his staff,” Mintzer insisted, “shall be an employee or an agent of AJC.” Shoenfeld, Mintzer assured his colleagues, “briefs the men, supervises their tactics and activities…[and] prepares and submits reports on a continuing basis.”¹³

The fearless detective proved a brilliant choice to run the new undercover operation. Born in 1891 to Hungarian Jewish immigrants and raised on the Lower East Side, Shoenfeld earned a reputation as being the city’s original “tough Jew” after breaking up many of its most dangerous gangs in the early twentieth century. Having dealt with death threats from mobsters and hardened criminals for over three decades and having fought in World War I, the burly detective was not afraid of Nazis and fascists.

But Shoenfeld did worry about the safety of his undercover operatives. Fearing retribution if anyone discovered the identity of his spies, he never mentioned their names but instead listed them as “Reporters” with initials such as “GEC,” “A,” “B,” “BBB,” and “W.” There was one exception: he lured Mario Buzzi, the intrepid spy who helped foil the Columbians, away from the ANL to spy on Middle Eastern and Arab radicals who called for the destruction of Israel. With little money to spend on full-time agents, he relied on two or three local operatives to monitor hate groups during the course of their regular jobs. “Reporter A,” “an unusually resourceful operative” whom he paid $4,680 annually ($62,347 in 2024 dollars), worked “among the leadership of the old-line anti-Semitic movement, [and] utilize[d] one of the principal organizations as a window on the entire anti-Semitic organizational network in this country.” Anytime his agents warned him of potential violence, Shoenfeld went into the field to check things out for himself and alerted Mintzer when necessary.¹⁴

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Abraham Shoenfeld (courtesy of Ellen James)

Shoenfeld’s immediate charge was to monitor any group that threatened American Jews, especially those living in New York City. After several months of observation, his agents suggested he pay close attention to Frederick Charles Weiss, the ideological brains behind Madole’s party, its main financier, and the person to whom Nazis in Germany and abroad turned for help in resurrecting their fallen movement.¹⁵

Unlike many postwar Nazis and fascists who dreamed up fantastic plots that had little chance of success, Weiss impressed New York’s Jewish leaders “as a man of great vitality and determination” who was “deeply involved in neo-Nazi and fascist intrigue on an international scale. He is not a crackpot.” Weiss struck one undercover operative as possessed of “Old world charm that is also backed with an active mind and a Heidelberg-Sorbonne education.”¹⁶

Weiss was far shrewder than his American fascist peers. The German-born fascist moved to the United States in 1910. He returned to his homeland to serve as an artillery captain in the Kaiser’s army during World War I and came back to New York after the Armistice. Weiss thought he could hide his Nazi leanings by not joining the German-American Bund, but U.S. Immigration authorities deemed him a threat to national security and held him on Ellis Island for over a year during World War II.¹⁷

Weiss survived the war with his wealth and antisemitic ideas intact. A partner in a German gold- and silver-plating firm, he earned a small fortune from his forty patents and from property rentals in suburban White Plains, near his home in Middletown, New York. Remaining a German citizen for the rest of his life, Weiss used his wealth to fund the postwar Nazi revival in Germany and to start Le Blanc Publications, a company that published far-right antisemitic, racist, and nationalist propaganda—the kind of materials that the German government had prohibited from being printed in their country.

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Frederick Weiss inside Mana Truhill’s apartment (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Shoenberg’s undercover agent “GEC,” who covered right-wing movements in metropolitan New York for an unnamed periodical, warned him that the German émigré was in close contact “with leading fascists, anti-Semites, and extreme nationalists” throughout the world.” His correspondents included former SS general and German Socialist Reich Party cofounder Otto Remer, Swedish Anti-Jewish Action League leader Einar Aberg, and British Imperial Fascist League head Arnold Leese. AJC spies reported that Weiss and Madole were building an impressive mailing list of top ex-Nazi military leaders and party members punished for war crimes. Madole also maintained close correspondence with leading American fascists such as Columbian Emory Burke and Atlanta-based George Van Horn Moseley.¹⁸

James Madole was the leader of the NRP, but the party was Weiss’s creation. The wealthy German preferred operating behind the scenes, planning the moves necessary to build a cadre of dedicated supporters in the United States and abroad. His ultimate goal was the creation of a new Reich, and the starting point was New York City, the stronghold of American Nazi support from the late 1920s until the end of World War II. Weiss regarded antisemitism “as both a dynamic propaganda weapon and an excellent come-on in the promotion of totalitarianism.” In January 1949, as a revived worldwide Nazi movement gained traction, he accelerated its American growth by convincing two veteran New York fascists to join him in founding the National Renaissance Party: Kurt Mertig, German-born head of the antisemitic Citizens’ Protective League, and W. Henry MacFarland Jr., American-born leader of the Nationalist Action League. Their new party took its name from a line in Hitler’s last will and testament: “I die with a happy heart aware [that there] will spring up … the seed of a radiant renaissance of the National Socialist movement.”¹⁹

Sixty-three-year-old Weiss knew that if Nazism were to take hold in America, it would need a younger American to lead it and not two gray-haired men with thick German accents. For Weiss and Mertig, that person was James Madole. Weiss would work behind the scenes as the party’s senior advisor and chief financial supporter, while Mertig and MacFarland focused on other political concerns. It would be up to twenty-two-year-old Madole to seize the mantle as central coordinator for a worldwide Nazi revival.

James Hartung Madole was born on July 7, 1927, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After his parents divorced when he was two, he and his mother, Grace, moved to Brooklyn in 1930, where they lived with his grandmother. Three years later, mother and son relocated to Beacon, New York, some fifty miles north of Manhattan. Grace supported her family by working as a clerk for Metropolitan Life Insurance for the next several decades.²⁰

Like Jesse B. Stoner, James Madole started hating Jews and Blacks at an early age and never stopped. And like Stoner, he suffered a childhood illness that affected him for the rest of his life; polio for Stoner, debilitating asthma for Madole. But unlike Stoner’s family, who disowned their hate-filled relative, Madole’s mother was a rabid antisemite who encouraged his activism. “Madole probably had a fixation on his mother,” a journalist observed in 1949; his political activities “had been encouraged and directed by his mother since the time that Madole was in high school.” The two lived together for the rest of his life, even sharing the same bed when they moved to a one-bedroom apartment on West Ninetieth Street in 1954 and continuing to do so until his death. She and Weiss served as his main advisors.²¹

Madole began his fascist activities as a Beacon High School senior by founding the Animist party in 1945. A right-wing movement inspired by the science fiction writings of pro-Nazi antisemite Charles Hudson, Madole’s party denounced democracy as “rule by the ignorant mass” and demanded a government run by the “intellectual elite” that would “maintain the glory of Aryan culture and civilization.” Within a short time, the ambitious high school senior compiled a membership list of 1,052 people and fifty-five contributors. Three years later, convinced that America was ripe for fascism, he placed an ad in Henry MacFarland’s National Progress encouraging “nationalists and constructive right-wing thinkers who are interested in a unification of the anti-Communist, anti-Internationalist forces in America” to contact him about forging a new alliance. Over the next several years, Madole worked with MacFarland, Mertig, and Weiss, expanding his network of fascist allies and learning the ins and outs of running an organization. The young führer did well enough to lead the party for the next thirty years.²²

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James Madole in NRP uniform (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Could a Nazi party establish a beachhead in America just four years after the end of World War II? James Madole thought so. He launched the National Renaissance Party in 1949, the same year the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and Mao Zedong’s Communist People’s Republic of China came to power. The Cold War created a new age of anxiety different from the immediate postwar world when returning veterans had worried mainly about jobs and housing. Now, they worried about whether they and their loved ones could survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. And they wondered who would protect the country against the deadly communist threat.²³

Madole used Cold War anxieties to distinguish his party from the Columbians’ and Stoner’s political ventures. The NRP offered a national vision of government that went beyond simple calls to rid the nation of Jews and Blacks. Eliminating both groups was just the first step in creating a nation that served the needs of white Christians and a government that would win the Cold War against the godless Soviet Union. Like other right-wing leaders, Madole insisted that every Jew was a communist and every communist a Jew. His new party promised to be far more aggressive than timid Democrats and Republicans in protecting citizens from the Red threat.

Raising the old canard of dual loyalties, Madole argued that with the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews could no longer be trusted to put American interests over Israeli interests, or even Soviet interests for that matter. Unlike their American counterparts, postwar Soviet leaders initially denounced antisemitism and racism. After the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in 1949, Madole accused Jews of endangering the nation’s very existence. Many of the nuclear physicists who developed the atomic bomb were Jewish. What if they passed nuclear secrets to Israel or to the Jew-friendly Soviets? Fears of annihilation allowed Madole’s potential supporters to claim they were not prejudiced antisemites, but patriots saving the nation from a Jewish–communist threat that promised widespread death and destruction.

Madole saw the NRP as a traditional political party with untraditional ideas. He offered potential followers a far more radical vision of American government than Stoner, Burke, or Loomis had. Maintaining a lifelong contempt for democracy, a political system he believed pandered to the dim-witted, the NRP leader called for the “abolition of parliamentary government and the substitution of [fascist] government by a trained national-minded elite.” They, in turn, would “imbue the American youth with national pride as a sure antidote to the international poison of World Communism.” The Jewish–Red alliance would be defeated by forging closer relations with the German government, as well as an alliance with Muslims in the Middle East and Japanese in the Far East.²⁴

The National Renaissance Party would replace democracy with a glorious new era of autocracy and replace weak presidents with strong leaders who would fight to preserve white Christian America against all enemies, and that included Jews, Blacks, and the Soviet Union. There would be no vacillation in the face of the Soviet nuclear threat.

In early 1949, Madole released his plan “For a White Christian America.” Sounding themes like the Columbians’ and Stoner’s Anti-Jewish Party, he appealed to poor white workers who had been ignored by the nation’s political elite and by the prosperous leaders of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. The Democratic and Republican parties had betrayed citizens and could no longer be trusted because they were controlled by the Jews and their money. A new party was needed that would speak for ordinary white Christian Americans. Madole promised that the National Renaissance Party would “wrest control of America from the cowardly middle class parties who have become instruments for electing candidates satisfactory to the minority races but hostile to the interest of the great mass of the American people.” Those masses would soon realize the best interests of “their race and nation” lay in supporting the NRP.²⁵

To achieve power, Madole called on rival nationalist groups to “bury the hatchet of petty jealousies and antagonism and work together.” He wanted to forge a “United Caucasian Organization” that would put a White Supremacist in the White House in 1952.26

The initial response to Madole’s pleas for support proved encouraging. By March 1949, over 200 people had sent him one dollar for the party’s annual membership fee or three dollars, which also entitled them to copies of the National Renaissance Bulletin.²⁷

Madole offered potential voters an elaborate nine-point program for transforming national politics that exceeded anything proposed by Stoner or the Columbians. The New York Nazi saw himself as a courageous American patriot whose ideas were drawn directly from the Founding Fathers. But unlike the Columbians, he bypassed George Washington in favor of Alexander Hamilton’s concept “of an American Republic dominated and governed by the best minds of the nation or the intellectual elite.” The old politics preached by mainstream politicians, Madole declared, would “never set the American soul aflame with crusading fanaticism and love of America, only a new doctrine will suffice.” He envisioned a nation run by autocrats on behalf of the American people—just as Germany had turned to Adolf Hitler to pull the nation out of its multiple troubles. Democracy, he suggested, was a political system for the weak.²⁸

Madole was no less prejudiced than Stoner; he was just smarter in the way he packaged his message. The NRP’s nine-point program promised to reverse the damages brought about by Reds, Jews, and Blacks by embracing policies aimed at promoting “racial nationalism” and economic prosperity. They would stop appeasing communists and the “howling pack of New York kikes, whose sole contributions to American culture have been syphilis and usury.” Once in power, his party would “enforce a strict policy of racial segregation in America” that would “preserve and advance the culturally dominant White Aryan Race.” They would accomplish that by deporting Blacks who “cannot be assimilated with the culturally predominant White Race.”²⁹

As for the nation’s Jews, his party would deprive them of American citizenship and bar them from holding any political or professional posts. “The Jew constitutes an alien virus in our national blood stream and as such he must be purged from our cultural, economic and political life.” Calls for death to Jews would come later. In the meantime, the NRP promised to ban marriages between whites and Jews, as well as between whites and Blacks. “One Race, One Nation, One Leader” was their motto.³⁰

The NRP offered something the Columbians’ and Stoner’s parties did not: a more detailed vision for improving the material lives of citizens. To bring greater prosperity to business and labor, Madole called for the creation of an “American Corporate economy wherein labor and management will be equally represented” in a newly created Economic Department which would pledge to settle all disputes with “impartial tribunals.” An NRP-led government would combine “German scientific and military genius” with “American technology mass production technique and man-power” to dominate the economic markets of Europe and North America and bring greater wealth to ordinary citizens. To obtain the skills needed to prosper in this new era, Madole’s party promised “free college education to all American youth.” His party would also solve housing shortages by launching a “ten-year reconstruction project for complete slum clearance.” Finally, the NRP demanded U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations “to prevent the further exploitation of American resources and man-power by foreign parasites.”³¹

In 1950, a new nationalist party based on racism, antisemitism, anticommunism, and authoritarianism seemed a viable possibility. Between 1948 and 1952, old party lines were fracturing. Democrats and Republicans were riven by deep internal divisions that threatened to weaken them if not tear them asunder. In 1948, unhappy with the Democrats’ reluctance to endorse segregation and preserve White Supremacy, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond led a walk-out at the party’s convention and founded the States Rights Democratic Party—popularly known as the Dixiecrats—and agreed to run as its presidential candidate. Although he finished a distant third to Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey, Thurmond was the only third-party candidate to collect any electoral votes.³²

Republicans found themselves deeply divided in the run-up to the 1952 presidential election. Conservatives threw their support behind longtime isolationist and anti–New Dealer Ohio senator Robert Taft, while moderates and liberals favored General Dwight Eisenhower as their standard-bearer. Both wings of the party were challenged by members on the far right who wanted a strong Cold War warrior like General Douglas MacArthur. Eisenhower would emerge victorious at the GOP convention and in the November election. However, his victory came at the cost of bitter divisions that would soon allow Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin to emerge as the new face of the party’s far right wing and leader of its antisemitic Red Scare. Attacked by liberals within his party, McCarthy remained popular with a wide swath of Americans. A poll in 1954 revealed that more than 50 percent of Americans backed his anticommunist stance.³³

Madole felt confident that given the divisions within the two mainstream parties, the time was ripe for a third party that would stand up for ordinary Americans. Despite the fact that his severe asthma kept him from holding even minor clerical jobs for more than a year or two, the NRP head believed he had the strength and ability to head up a new third party and a new confederation of nationalist groups. Filled with youthful determination, he called on supporters to abandon the useless parties of the past; he also worked to expand his base by forging alliances with fascist and neo-Nazi groups throughout the country, among them Stoner’s Anti-Jewish party.³⁴

Platforms and alliances were just words and promises. Madole needed members, lots of members, if his party was to succeed. Taking a lesson from Hitler’s early brownshirt years in Munich, the New York führer saw violence as a way to garner publicity and attract sympathizers. His hoped-for Nazi takeover of the United States would not be a peaceful one.

Madole designed his first public meeting to attract widespread media coverage by provoking the city’s Jews. On July 16, 1949, fifty members of the NRP’s security force secured a spot on the corner of Wilson Avenue and Boston Road in the Bronx, a neighborhood heavily populated by Jewish families. As Madole launched into vicious attacks on Zionists and Zionism, angry Jewish war veterans began heckling, calling him and his Nazi guards a bunch of “bums.” When they ignored the security unit’s demand to shut up, a “pitched battle” broke out. Nazis knocked down a Jewish veteran, but police stopped the brawl before there were any serious injuries. Madole declared the melee a victory. “One hundred Jews,” he boasted, had been repeatedly beaten back by “fifty party members, all veterans, who used folded newspapers.”³⁵

The media attention he received confirmed Madole’s belief in the efficacy of violence. Speaking at a meeting of Henry MacFarland’s fascist National Action League in Philadelphia the following week, he told the crowd the time for talking was past; it was time for action. Adopting a Biblical defense similar to J. B. Stoner’s reliance on Christian Identity, Madole assured supporters that violence against Jews was not anti-Christian. “Christ used violence—a whip to drive them from the Temple.”³⁶

Madole got a further taste for violence when he joined a mob of 300 rioters protesting Black activist Paul Robeson’s fundraising concert for the Civil Rights Congress held in Peekskill, New York, in late August 1949. Madole and his chief lieutenant Raymond Burke were arrested for distributing antisemitic flyers and were taken before a grand jury convened to investigate the two “anti-semitic agitators.”³⁷

Madole continued his campaign of hate that fall by staging the NRP’s first Manhattan rally on the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street and Second Avenue. He could not have chosen a better place. The German-dominated Yorkville neighborhood was the center of American Nazi activities before World War II. Between 1937 and 1941, the German-American Bund held regular street parades in the Upper East Side neighborhood, replete with Nazi flags, uniforms, swastikas, and German chants. Jews were not welcome there. Little changed after the war. Madole expected to find an enthusiastic crowd of fellow believers among the neighborhood’s rabidly antisemitic German, Czech, and Hungarian residents.³⁸

At the first rally that fall, thirty NRP thugs dressed in storm-trooper uniforms handed out 500 copies of the National Renaissance Bulletin. Kurt Mertig and Christian Front leader C. Daniel Kurtz took the stage and launched into familiar diatribes denouncing Jews and communists as the greatest threat to American security. The fascist speakers were cheered by a sympathetic crowd of 300, many of whom joined the NRP at the end of the meeting.³⁹

A second rally held on September 2, 1949, proved far more contentious. Fifteen minutes into Madole’s speech, a group of Jewish War Veterans who had gathered on Eighty-Sixth Street challenged the right of a Nazi to speak on behalf of American war veterans. When one Jewish veteran was allowed to talk, the infuriated pro-Nazi crowd booed him off the impromptu stage. A full-scale riot was avoided when police charged the crowd and separated the two sides. Madole declared it another victory. Police canceled a third Yorkville rally “to prevent a riot.”⁴⁰

Madole’s rise to local prominence was meteoric. In fewer than nine months, his party “earned the hatred of [their] enemies,” the Jews of America. The National Renaissance Party, he boasted, was “the only nationalist political party in the East and the only one in America which holds regular outdoor rallies.” He urged patriotic New Yorkers to “take an active part in the fight for your country.” Citizens in other parts of the nation could do likewise by joining the party and subscribing to the NR Bulletin. Madole’s calls to defeat the communist–Jewish alliance grew even more pronounced after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949.41

None of this was news to Abe Shoenfeld. His agents reported on Madole’s activities throughout 1949—and continued doing so into the 1960s. The spymaster understood the public relations disaster that could befall them if it became widely known that Jews were spying on Christians. With a limited number of agents, he knew he needed to rely on the authorities for help. After sharing their findings with his AJC employers, he sent all pertinent information to the New York City Police Department, the FBI, the CIA, Army and Naval Intelligence, and, occasionally, to the New York Times.⁴²

James Sheldon wanted to do more than just monitor and observe. As NRP-inspired violence and international Nazi activity mounted, the far more aggressive Anti-Nazi League head wanted to get someone inside Madole’s organization and disrupt its activities. He needed a person Madole would trust—someone with proven fascist ties. Sheldon knew just the right man, former Columbian Lanier Waller.

Waller was one of many agents provocateurs Sheldon asked to join the NRP, rise within the ranks, secure evidence of its activities, and work toward its demise. The Christian men and women who risked their lives spying and living among Nazis proved an odd lot: Emmanuel Trujillo, a World War II veteran who later founded the Peyote Way Church of God that attracted the likes of Timothy Leary; Irene Dovale, a militant feminist and communist who tried to take over the party’s leadership; and Larry Sestito, a former convict who headed the Italian fascist movement in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area. No Hollywood screenwriter could have invented such an eclectic group of spies.

Lanier Waller was the first far-right extremist to switch loyalties and work for Sheldon.

After swearing out affidavits against the Columbian leadership at ANL headquarters in December 1946, Waller returned to Atlanta. Unable to find work or live on the meager disability pension he received from the Marines, and now a pariah to his former friends, Waller asked Sheldon for a job. Sheldon agreed. For the next several years, Waller worked undercover, traveling the country and sending the ANL reports about Burke, Loomis, the Ku Klux Klan, Smith, and a young New York Nazi who had been cooperating with all of them, James Madole.⁴³

Spying for the ANL was more than a job for Waller. The time he spent in New York in late 1946 had changed the way he thought about Jews and Blacks. He had eaten dinner with them, ridden the subways with them, and “learned fast how kind they could be and how human they were.” Waller came to realize “how wrong and bad the things I’d been taught all my life were.” In New York, “there was no place for anyone with prejudice … they were all Americans and worked and played and worshipped together.” He could no longer stand by while one group of citizens called for death to fellow Americans simply because of their religion or race. He would make up for his past transgressions by helping Sheldon in whatever way he could.⁴⁴

Waller was persona non grata after testifying against the Columbians. However, once he agreed to spy for Sheldon, he effected a false reconciliation with Homer Loomis Jr. Anxious for a new trial, Loomis offered to pay Waller if he would “support [his] effort to re-open the Columbian cases” and join him and Burke on Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade. Waller agreed to recant his earlier testimony. “I’m a Ch[ristian] Nationalist now,” he wrote Sheldon that September. “They trust me.”⁴⁵

In February 1949, after Homer Loomis Jr. told him about meeting Madole on his recent trip to New York, Waller alerted Sheldon to a recently organized “anti-Semitic and anti-Negro” group called the “American Renaissance Party.” He and Loomis got the name wrong, but the mission right. “They want to organize in the South,” Loomis told Waller, “and have several men throughout the South to see how the people will go for it.” Hoping to forestall its growth, Sheldon asked Waller to relocate to New York and investigate the NRP.⁴⁶

That December, Waller met with Madole and ingratiated himself with the NRP führer by exaggerating his relationship with Loomis and Burke. Madole was impressed and asked Waller to open NRP branches in Georgia and Texas. He also invited the World War II veteran to spend the day at his home where they could discuss the party’s plans for national and global expansion.⁴⁷

On Thursday, January 12, 1950, Lanier Waller left Grand Central Station on a train bound for Beacon, New York. Arriving in Beacon after a two-hour ride, Waller took a bus to the large two-story home on East Main Street that Frederick Weiss had provided for Madole and his mother. After greeting his new recruit, Madole took him upstairs to his private office, which was stacked with pro-fascist literature, and “began telling [him] the plans of the NRP and they are identical to those of The Columbians, Inc.” His host had followed their rise and knew several of the Columbians and numerous people in Atlanta. Madole had even modeled his NRP storm-trooper uniforms after the much-admired Columbians. Despite his desire for public respectability, he enjoyed infuriating his enemies by wearing Nazi gear. “Madole seems to be very crazy about uniforms and has six as national commander of the NRP. One is khaki with a black tie and another is fire engine red.”⁴⁸

A good spy knows how to take advantage of unanticipated opportunities. When the NRP führer went downstairs to get coffee and cake, Waller seized the chance to rifle through his files. He discovered a mailing list of “several hundred or even thousands,” including J. B. Stoner, whom Madole knew “personally.”⁴⁹

Upon returning with refreshments, the unsuspecting Nazi leader revealed his plans to expand his movement by appealing to former Columbians and unhappy Klansmen. Madole also told Waller of an unusual alliance he had forged with Benjamin D. Gibbons, the Black head of the Universal African Nationalist Movement in Harlem. Gibbons’s group, he explained, was “trying to get the government to furnish ships on which they hope to take the niggers back to Africa where they belong in the first damn place.”⁵⁰

Eager to get inside the NRP’s inner circle, Waller volunteered to help expand the party’s membership beyond the New York metropolitan area. A delighted Madole asked him to work with Edward Fields, organizing NRP branches in Atlanta and throughout the South. Waller promised to “do all [he] could to help carry out the fight down there.” Madole thanked him and, Waller later reported, “said he was proud to have met me and I could be equally proud of the great work I had done in the Columbians and the work which I could do in their movement. I don’t think he was suspicious of me at all.”⁵¹

Following their conversation, Waller took a train back to New York City. Arriving at 6:00 P.M., he immediately went to Sheldon’s midtown office on Forty-Sixth street and Seventh Avenue, where he left copies of the National Renaissance Bulletin, NRP propaganda, and the correspondence he had swiped from Madole’s office.⁵²

Waller kept his promise to Madole and headed south, where he updated Sheldon on events in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia. Waller’s departure left Sheldon with no source inside the NRP. On the other hand, Abe Shoenfeld’s agents had warned him that Madole had grown increasingly emboldened and was now openly advocating “the physical extermination of all Jews.” A week later, as rumors spread that Jews were monitoring their activities, NRP allies in Union, New Jersey, called for death to anyone caught spying on behalf of Jews. “Kill them!” urged one fascist.⁵³

To Madole and his supporters, the ADL, ANL, and AJC were indistinguishable. They were all Jews spying on God-fearing Christians. They got it half right: all three were spying on Christians; but they were far from united in their attitude toward each another. Sheldon thought both of the other groups were far too timid; the AJC and ADL thought Sheldon was far too aggressive and too close to communists. AJC agents accused him of hiring people who were “definitely communist-tainted” and “followed almost verbatim the [communist] Daily Worker line.” Sheldon was leery of relying on communists, but unlike the ADL or AJC he would use anyone who could help suppress the rising fascist threat in America.⁵⁴

Like other far-right groups, the NRP accused American Jews and their organizations of controlling the nation’s political, financial, and media institutions. Those accusations grew even more pronounced during the Korean War and subsequent Red Scare. Lasting from June 1950 until July 1953, the Korean conflict provided nationalists like General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Joseph McCarthy with an opportunity to heighten hatred of Jews by repeatedly associating them with communism. Madole hoped these two men could command sufficient attention to allow the NRP to be seen as part of a respectable anticommunist movement. “The anti-Semites have jumped on the anti-Communism bandwagon,” an AJC agent observed in 1951, “and are striving to manipulate the issue for their own ends.” Demagogues hoped “to gain respectability” and new members by “publicizing the equation of Jews with Communism” and promising to rid the nation of both.⁵⁵

New York was no Atlanta, but Madole hoped he could move it in that direction. By early 1952, he claimed his Bulletin had a circulation of 12,000 copies per month. That May, the emboldened NRP leader began holding regular weekly meetings on the corner of Eighty-Fourth Street and York Avenue that featured an array of “rabble rousers” and “troublemakers.” As Madole grew increasingly militant, ADL and AJC leaders agreed to share information gathered from their operatives and field offices. Because they suspected James Sheldon was associating with communists, they refused to work with the ANL. They simply did not want to risk more accusations of Jewish communists spying on American Christians.⁵⁶

Excluded from that partnership, James Sheldon decided to see the Nazi leader in action. On Friday night, September 5, 1952, he attended a Yorkville rally accompanied by his wife, Dorothy, and undercover agent Marcus Brown. Like Madole, Sheldon believed the NRP was well positioned to become the leading fascist force outside the South. He worried that a charismatic orator in the vein of Adolf Hitler could galvanize nationalists throughout the nation. Fortunately, Madole was no Hitler. “Madole is not a stirring speaker,” Sheldon observed, “his style of address being almost academic.” But there was nothing academic about his message. The NRP, Madole told the crowd of 100, “was both in fact and principle a Nazi movement.” He praised Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco as heroes of Western civilization, blamed Jews for starting World War II, and hailed Joe McCarthy and Douglas MacArthur as great American patriots. Dorothy Sheldon was struck by the antisemitic fervor of the “short, thin” man with a “very sharp nose and wild, intense eyes of bluish green color,” and by the equally antisemitic fervor of his supporters.⁵⁷

Madole promised that, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, the end of democracy would be accompanied by the appearance of a new führer who would save the world from the evils of communism and Judaism. “We’re not mourning over Hitler,” he told another Yorkville crowd that October. “We are creating a new one.” Strong leaders were needed for the postwar world, but democracy and communism had consistently produced “weak leaders who will sell you out.” Madole called on citizens to “do away with Democracy” and institute “a totalitarian form of government” led by trained NRP experts.⁵⁸

Determined to take over the government through either elections or coups, Madole reorganized his Elite Guard into a deadly military unit similar to the Klan’s murderous Klavalier Klub and the Columbians’ Legion of Loyalty. Enlisting in the NRP’s Elite Guard, Madole told recruits, was tantamount to enlisting “in a private army, whose sworn purpose is the establishment of an American regime based on the principles of Racial Nationalism and Social Justice.” Chosen for their toughness and loyalty to the cause, Madole’s storm troopers were told their main enemies consisted of “International Jewry on the Left and International Jewish Finance on the Right, both of these international forces seek to exploit the nation as a whole for their own self purposes.”⁵⁹

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NRP stickers plastered around New York City (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Commanded by German-born Hans Schmidt and American Matt Koehl, the Elite Guard functioned like Hitler’s SS, protecting its leader from attacks by the “Jewish scum that from time to time try to stop our meetings.” Members wore uniforms consisting of a gray shirt, black tie, black trousers, black cap, and armband featuring a German eagle with an SS-like lightning bolt through its middle. Madole required that, before being given the honor of wearing the NRP uniform, members of his elite force take an oath swearing to “unconditionally obey the leaders of the NRP” and be “ready to give [their] life at any time.”⁶⁰

Were New York Jews overreacting to Madole’s nascent Nazi movement? New York City police and local FBI agents thought so; they accumulated evidence but repeatedly minimized the threat posed by the NRP. But not James Sheldon or his agents. “These nationalist groups of the Madole variety must be watched,” warned one operative. “They are looking for a national führer and if they find one they can gather a big and threatening following.” Those warnings grew more frightening as Madole succeeded in forging alliances with Nazis and fascists around the world. “Nazism is not dead in Germany,” the New York Times editorialized in January 1953. “Nazism was smashed to a pulp by 1945, but the firm and vigorous roots remained.” Given time, the editorial concluded, “a form of Nazism could again rise to power in Germany.”⁶¹

West German authorities considered Madole’s mentor Frederick Weiss an important American contact for die-hard Nazis. H. Keith Thompson, Weiss’s aide and the NRP’s first congressional candidate, served as a registered American agent for the banned Socialist Reich Party and its leader, former SS general Otto Remer. Following a major International Fascist Alliance conference in Naples in October 1951, both men provided Madole with contacts who could help expand the NRP into a worldwide force.⁶²

As fascists and Nazis abroad began reorganizing their formerly outlawed parties in the early 1950s, the ADL-AJC Joint Fact-Finding Committee considered the rising international threat so serious that they opened a joint office in Germany to monitor their activities and “concern ourselves with counteractive measures in their area.” An equally troubled Sheldon, though lacking the funds needed to set up a foreign office, hired German-born investigator Guenther Reinhardt to observe and report on developments throughout Europe.⁶³

Bolstered by his growing alliance with American and foreign fascists, the NRP’s führer began sounding increasingly like J. B. Stoner. “I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” he assured an enthusiastic Yorkville crowd in February 1953. “I will plant the swastika in Washington” and then “I will finish the job that Hitler started.” The NRP would raise an army of patriots that would “teach the youth of our country to turn the weapons against the Jews and that will solve the problem once and for all.” What Hitler had accomplished in Europe, he promised followers, “the National Renaissance Party shall yet accomplish in America.”⁶⁴

Such a turn of events would only happen if Americans joined the NRP and voted its candidates into office. Hard-working white Christians needed a party that would represent those at the bottom of the economic ladder—folks abandoned by upwardly mobile professional classes and mainstream politicians who, like Judas, had sold them out for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver. Only the NRP cared about their suffering; only the NRP would represent their interests; only the NRP could save America.

By early 1953, Madole had opened an NRP chapter in Louisville and was in the process of setting up branches in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Dayton, Chicago, and Trion, Georgia. He felt confident he could do what the Columbians and Stoner had not been able to: defeat the Jewish spies who had defeated them. Emory Burke had sent him a copy of his booklet Chain-Ganged by the Jewish Gestapo, which described the un-American spy operation launched against him by the Anti-Nazi League. After reading it, Madole wrote to U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. accusing the ANL of usurping “the power of the Federal Government by establishing a private police force on American soil in Atlanta.”⁶⁵

Confident he would not be stopped by police or government authorities, Madole delivered increasingly antisemitic speeches that were especially offensive to the city’s many Holocaust survivors. That spring, speaking before a sympathetic Yorkville crowd, he “refuted and ridiculed the hoax and great lie of the six million Jews who were said to have been slaughtered.” He claimed that many of the so-called dead were living in New York. All he lacked were their actual addresses. Sounding a familiar refrain, he promised yet again, “We shall do in America what Hitler accomplished in Germany, what Franco accomplished in Spain.” The Jews “have got to get the same concentration camps as they got in Germany and Italy … We’ve got to get rid of them, the sooner the better.”⁶⁶

The NRP would begin its political ascent by running H. Keith Thompson for the congressional seat in the Yorkville neighborhood that fall. That would be the first step in their plan to seize control of the American government—legally, if possible, or through violence if necessary.⁶⁷

Burke, Loomis, and Stoner wanted a fascist America. Madole wanted a fascist world. To achieve that, he needed to expand his reach beyond the nation’s borders. Madole assumed the ANL, ADL, and AJC were spying on the NRP but thought himself cleverer than the Jews. He needed a trusted aide to lead his Overseas Division and forge an international coalition by corresponding with fascists and former Nazis in Germany, South America, and throughout the world. He also wanted someone who could expand his membership by heading up the NRP’s newly created Women’s Division.

Madole knew just the right person for each position: Mana Truhill and Ruth Ross. But neither was who they appeared to be.

8.

Getting Inside the International Fascist Front

Walking across town to Eighty-Seventh Street and Second Avenue on Friday evening, May 29, 1953, Emmanuel Trujillo was determined to see James Madole in action. He had heard about his group from fellow students at the communist Jefferson School of Social Science and thought he “might be able to smoke out some of the Nazi rats that call themselves the National Renaissance Party.” Whatever plans he may have had for the near future ended when he turned the corner on Eighty-Seventh Street and saw a phalanx of storm troopers assembled in military fashion.¹

Arriving shortly after 7:30 P.M, the twenty-three-year-old army veteran heard Madole speak to a crowd of fifty people, while five police officers stood nearby ready to stop any outbreak of violence. “The Jew is a parasite on the economic blood streams of nations in which he resides,” the young führer told the gathered men and women. “The Jew has never tilled the soil or engaged in hard manual labor but has lived off those who do.” Likewise, Blacks had never “erected a civilization” or “left any lasting monument to [their] Race.” Calls for racial equality must be resisted at all costs, for they would lead to the destruction of the Aryan race. “The Jew and his stooge the African Negro must go and we Nazis will help the American people do the job they must do.”²

Madole promised NRP patriots would save the nation by destroying “the federal octopus which is composed of corrupt politicians in the service of their Jewish masters.” They would begin by taking the vote away from Blacks and then transporting them all “back to Africa.” Madole accused American Jews of being traitorous communists and reminded listeners that Jewish spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were about to be executed for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. “We all know that the penalty for treason is death,” Madole told the crowd, “and we will see to it that this penalty is carried out to the last letter of our American law.”³

Once the NRP succeeded in ridding the country of Jews and Blacks, Madole promised that a fascist government “filled with the spirit and courage of our Aryan forefathers … [would] see the sun of a new age rise upon an America which [would] truly be the greatest nation in the world.”⁴

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Madole speaking at NRP rally (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

As the self-proclaimed American führer finished his speech, a young man standing nearby shouted, “I’ve gotta good mind ta kick your teeth in. And I’m a Jew. What do ya think of that?” After Madole sneered, “Go ’way ‘Jew Boy,’” a fight broke out between NRP storm troopers and Jewish onlookers. Despite loathing the Nazi’s message, Trujillo saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with Madole’s crowd. He joined the fight and began pulling angry Jews off the wiry-thin NRP leader. Madole emerged from the scuffle with a black eye and promised Trujillo he would not forget his help. Manny did not intend to let him forget it. “I will use that to form a bond of friendship with Modal [sic].”⁵

When police arrested Madole’s mother, Grace, and took her to night court for refusing orders to move, Trujillo further endeared himself to Madole by spending the night with him until they bailed her out of jail. His time in the Yorkville police station proved almost as frightening as attending the Nazi street meeting. Trujillo was taken aback at how friendly the cops were to Madole and his mother. Seeing his surprise, Madole assured his new friend everything would be fine, for, as Trujillo reported, “he has many friends at 96th Street [police station].”⁶

By the time he returned to his apartment on Audubon Avenue and 168th Street, Emmanuel Trujillo had made a decision that altered the course of his life. He had gone to the meeting to assess the seriousness of the Nazi threat. Once he saw what the NRP was about, the combat veteran decided he had to do something to stop them. “So, this is just what the ‘NRP’ stands for,” he wrote in a memo to himself that night. “It stands for everything that I and a lot of men fought ‘W-W-2’ to stop. The NRP is getting quite a following, don’t kid yourself into thinking that ‘It can’t happen here.’ It can. And it will, if we Communists and the American people don’t stop it. We cannot just sit back and let the liberty of our Constitution ‘go to hell.’”⁷

Trujillo’s first step was to join the NRP under the assumed name Mana Truhill and keep a careful record of their activities. But he was not naïve. He knew he needed help. Friends had told him about two antifascist organizations that were fighting groups like Madole’s. His second step was to offer the ANL’s James Sheldon and the ADL’s Arnold Forster his services as an undercover spy. “Dear Sirs,” he wrote to them in early June, “If you give a damn for the memory of the Jews that were at the Warsaw Ghetto, if you have not forgotten yet the ovens that made flesh ash, if you can yet remember the mass graves and the gas chambers, please be at the corner of 88th Street and York Ave on Friday night. There you will see a street meeting of the Nazi Party here in the U.S.A.” Adding an element of urgency, he advised, “These people are not Fooling. I have joined the NRP (that is what they call it now). They all think that I am a good Nazi. If there is any way I can help you people in your fight, please let me know.”⁸

Only one of the two agency heads accepted his offer.

There are some people who enjoy living a life shrouded in mystery. Emmanuel Trujillo was one. Given his humble origins, it seemed quite likely that Manny, as his friends called him, would lead a life on the margins. Instead, he pursued an extraordinary life that no one, least of all himself, could have predicted. What little we know about Trujillo’s background comes largely from four sources: James Sheldon; fascist H. Keith Thompson, who worked with him in the NRP; Trujillo’s own somewhat unreliable narrative; and, sixty years later, his successors at Arizona’s Peyote Way Church of God.

Emmanuel Pardeahtan Trujillo was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on May 25, 1930, to Lillian Brenner, a fourteen-year-old Catholic woman of French and German descent, and a Mexican–Apache father (first name unknown) Trujillo, who had come to the United States in 1917 and enlisted in the U.S. Army to gain American citizenship. When his father died several months after his birth, Trujillo’s unmarried mother placed him in an orphanage. The baby was adopted by James and Mary Coyle, who renamed him James J. Coyle. Unhappy living in Philipsburg, New Jersey, fifteen-year-old Manny ran away from home and tried to enlist in the Army before the end of World War II. Too young to join the American forces, he lied about his age and joined the British Merchant Navy in time to engage in combat. “I was the tail end of the last war in Germany with the British,” he told Sheldon, but “I was not sure what I was fighting for.” Remaining in Germany after the war, sixteen-year-old Trujillo (or James J. Coyle as listed in his military records) returned from Hamburg in October 1946. In August 1947, he joined the U.S. Army. A year later, after being injured in a parachute jump, he was given an honorable discharge and 30 percent disability allowance.⁹

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Emmanuel Trujillo (aka Mana Truhill) and James Madole (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Sometime in the early 1950s, after a brief failed marriage, Trujillo rented a three-room apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City; bought a 1948 Harley-Davidson motorcycle; started hanging out in motorcycle bars, where he earned the nickname “Cochise”; and enrolled in the Jefferson School of Social Science. Launched by the Communist Party in 1944, the school trained young working-class men and women to become community activists. As Trujillo learned more about fascism and Nazism, he decided to see what the local Nazis were up to—a decision that led him to attend the NRP meeting on May 29, 1952. An acquaintance at the time described him as a “short man of slight build and a worried dark brooding face. He has his hair cut short and brushed down over his forehead in the fashion of [Marlon] Brando.”¹⁰

Trujillo’s desire to investigate the National Renaissance Party was influenced by several factors. During his time in the service, he witnessed the death and destruction caused by European Nazis and fascists. Upon returning home, his classes at the Jefferson School alerted him to the lingering dangers that Nazism posed if allowed to grow on American shores. The school also urged its students to become community activists working on behalf of democracy, an urging Manny took seriously. His undercover work for the ANL was also likely sparked by his discovery that he now had a Jewish stepfather. According to James Sheldon, Manny found out that his birth mother, Lillian Brenner, was living in New York with Meyer Rosen, a Jewish “laundry route man.”¹¹

Following the May 29 fistfight and night at the police station, Trujillo wasted no time taking advantage of Madole’s goodwill. After Trujillo joined the NRP on June 2 under the name Mana Truhill, Madole asked the tough young military veteran to speak at a small gathering of “big shot Nazis.” The meeting opened with thirty assembled members “heiling” Hitler and the GOP’s “Right Reverend Senator Joseph McCarthy.” Trujillo knew someone would eventually check his background, so he confessed he had been a communist but had left the party to join the far more patriotic NRP. “This is an American party for the American people. Not an American party for the Russian people and the Jews of the world.” He urged the group to use ideas, not violence, to convince other Americans to join their cause. “Just because we were in a few street fights we are not good Nazis.”¹²

Pleased with Trujillo’s speech, Madole asked the former army paratrooper to join his newly reorganized Elite Guard; training would begin the following week and Lance Corporal Truhill would be given weapons and a uniform. He was now one of them.

Despite his bravado, Manny feared for his safety. No one knew he was attending Nazi meetings; he wanted to gather more information before he contacted Sheldon and Forster. But he was suddenly gripped by second thoughts. “There’s no use fooling myself. I don’t like this at all. I never have been a brave person. I wish there were someone else in this with me. That way, if they were to find out the truth, I would have a chance of getting out … These Nazis are bastards from the word go. It’s up to someone to go in and find out all he can about them. And since I started this, I am in. I feel that it’s up to me to do the job. These Nazis are all the same in one way. They are all filled with hate, for everyone and everything that is not German or Nazi.”¹³

Trujillo had reason to be concerned for his safety. Like Adolf Hitler, Madole brooked no dissent within the ranks and threatened a violent end to anyone caught betraying them, especially if they were working for the Jews. Madole had sworn revenge not just on spies but on his critics. And few critics proved more troublesome than New York Post reporter and WMCA radio commentor Barry Gray. With the FBI ignoring threats on the right, especially to Jews and Blacks, the ANL and ADL began feeding Gray, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearson a steady stream of information about Nazi and fascist groups across the country. Gray had a particular animus toward Madole and his Nazi thugs and delighted in attacking them in his columns and on his popular radio show. He wanted to make sure that Madole’s ideas would never move from the margins to the mainstream. The NRP head vowed revenge—and got it. On September 4, 1952, after a particularly harsh anti-Nazi radio attack, Gray was jumped and “severely beaten” by two men as he walked down Madison Avenue toward Fifty-Eighth Street. When his friend comedy writer Snag Werris went to his aid, one of the thugs “stuck his hand inside his jacket to indicate he carried a pistol and snarled, ‘Get away, you Jew.’”¹⁴

Apparently, Gray did not get the message. Four months later, he was jumped again, this time by three men who kept punching him in the face and kicking him in the ribs before they fled the scene. The Nazis did not try to kill him, but Trujillo was warned that any NRP member caught betraying the organization would suffer more than just a beating. Madole knew the ANL and ADL were spying on him and remained alert to Jewish agents trying to infiltrate their group. “We are an American organization, a 100 per cent but we are under attack by the Jewish Gestapo as Fascists, Nazis, and a lot of other things,” he told supporters. “There are two big Jewish Gestapo outfits [ADL and ANL],” both of whom were “out to destroy Christian Civilization.” He denounced Barry Gray for taking “his orders” from the ADL. His main villain, however, was James Sheldon, “whose real name is Jacob Shapiro.” He accused Sheldon and the ANL of destroying the Columbians, “a good patriotic organization trying to prevent the mongrelization of the white race.” If they tried to do the same to his group, Madole’s storm troopers knew how to deal with ANL “spies, gestapo, pilferers and second-story men.”¹⁵

Despite his fears for his safety, Trujillo’s sense of patriotism and duty drove him to continue his undercover operation. “I am all the more sure after this meeting that these bastards must go, no matter what the personal cost.” When he first enlisted to fight in World War II, he was still too young to understand what he was fighting for. “‘Freedom’ ‘Liberty’ to me these were words that I knew but did not think too much about the meaning behind them. Even after I became a Communist these words did not take on much meaning for me.” But now he knew Nazis wanted to end democracy and kill Jews, Blacks, and anyone who disagreed with them. “THESE PEOPLE MUST BE STOPPED.” He would do what he could, but he faced the realities. “I hope things work out O.K. for if they ever find out who and what I am it will just be too bad.”¹⁶

Over the next several weeks, Trujillo proved his mettle, attending meetings in his storm-trooper uniform and beating back anyone who tried to attack Madole. Most of those fights involved clashes with members of the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A. Repulsed by the presence of uniformed neo-Nazis in their city, Jewish veterans had been confronting Nazis with their fists since the Bronx street fights in 1949. Those confrontations accelerated when Madole and his minions began holding regular outdoor meetings in 1953, where he labeled the claim that Nazis had slaughtered six million Jews a “hoax and great lie.”¹⁷

Infuriated Jewish War Veterans responded by holding regular counterdemonstrations on the corner of Eighty-Seventh Street and York Avenue. Sometimes they just tried to disrupt the NRP gatherings with constant heckling and fighting. Sometimes the Jews bested the Nazis, sometimes the Nazis bested the Jews. The latter usually occurred when Madole’s Elite Guard spotted a solitary Jew passing through “their” territory—like the evening of June 5, 1953, when they jumped a young boy wearing a Star of David around his neck who was walking on Eighty-Seventh Street between York and Second Avenues. “They got him in the eyes with the [alcohol] guns,” Trujillo recounted, “called him a ‘Jew bastard’ and told him to go ‘back where he came from.’ It’s too bad I could not help the kid out but too much depends on them trusting me.”¹⁸

Impressed with his recruit’s fearlessness, the NRP führer gave him more and more responsibility. Trujillo’s rise within Madole’s inner circle was hastened by the sudden departure of his chief security thug, Matt Koehl, who fled New York after being caught shooting “at a Jewish man wearing a skull cap.” Trujillo assumed Koehl’s position as coleader of the NRP’s Elite Guard along with Hans Schmidt.¹⁹

Madole admired Trujillo, but the feeling was far from mutual. “This Madole is quite mad. He is a thin man about 5´ 9˝ tall brown eyes … He has a thin face also and when speaking his eyes swell up as if they are going to pop right out of his head. From the way that he acts and speaks I am sure that he looks on himself as a ‘little Hitler.’ But no matter how mad he may be, nevertheless he is I am sure quite a crafty person and one that I must handle with kid gloves.”²⁰

By mid-June, Madole asked the man he knew as Mana Truhill to serve as his liaison to the Ku Klux Klan and various fascist and neo-Nazi groups along the East Coast. At Madole’s request, he wrote to J. B. Stoner, requesting Christian Anti-Jewish Party flyers and pamphlets the NRP could distribute in Yorkville. When Trujillo learned that Madole and his mother were commuting to Friday night street demonstrations from their home in Beacon, New York, two hours from Manhattan, he volunteered to hold private Wednesday night meetings for inner circle members at his apartment. A grateful Madole accepted the offer and continued to entrust the battle-tested combat veteran with greater responsibility. Even Trujillo was surprised by his rapid ascent within the party. “I can’t rush it too fast as they might think it odd. Things are going well and it looks like I am in. They are even seeking my advice on some things now. I wish I knew how long this has to go on before I can get my hands on some facts and split them wide open.”²¹

Since late May, Trujillo had been writing lengthy memos after each meeting. On June 15, confident he had amassed enough information to prove his worth, he showed up at James Sheldon’s midtown office and volunteered his services. When Trujillo recounted his background and mentioned that he was taking classes at the Jefferson School, Sheldon snapped, “That’s a left-wing one,” and was “thereafter very cold, suspecting a ‘plant.’” Given numerous accusations that the ANL was a “Jewish Gestapo,” Sheldon feared Trujillo might be a secret right-wing spy who would later accuse the ANL of being a communist front. “I told E.T. that he should understand that the NSANL and myself are as much opposed to communism as to fascism—and that he should be aware of this.”²²

When Trujillo handed him detailed accounts of past meetings, as well as a ream of NRP propaganda material, Sheldon decided to trust the slender young man. Whatever their misgivings, the ANL’s policy, he told Trujillo, was “to accept any information volunteered from any source whatsoever.” Sheldon promised to reimburse his new operative for rent, food, and any expenses he encountered, but would not offer him any pay. Trujillo accepted Sheldon’s terms and signed an oath Sheldon required of all operatives. “I felt it was worthwhile as I believed in what I was doing.”²³

When Trujillo made a similar offer to the ADL, they refused—convinced he was either a Red spy or a hustler looking for a quick financial score.

James Sheldon liked using military veterans as undercover operatives because he knew they were unlikely to fold under pressure or threats of violence. He was usually right. Despite occasional questions about his communist past from suspicious members, Trujillo continued to rise in the party hierarchy. Within a month, the handsome veteran with a devilish smile was serving as point person for all NRP interactions with local police. The cops in Yorkville, he warned Sheldon, “are working with the Nazis.” After a June meeting, Police Chief Hess went over to shake Madole’s hand. The chief, Madole told Trujillo, was “‘a good American.’ Coming from him that must mean a good Nazi.”²⁴

Trujillo also warned Sheldon that Madole had denounced the ANL head at a recent meeting. The Anti-Nazi League, the führer had told the crowd of eighty, “is just a front for Jews,” and its leader “a loud-mouth who is always getting in the papers attacking everything German.” Hinting at a violent end for all race traitors, Madole suggested that loyal Americans had little to fear from the ANL’s Christian turncoat because “our Germans” would “take care of him.”²⁵

Over the next several months, Truhill/Trujillo supplied Sheldon with a steady stream of detailed reports recounting what was said at public meetings and what was being planned at private NRP gatherings in his apartment. Despite confessing his mistaken communist past, a few NRP members still suspected Mana Truhill was not who he appeared to be. Unwilling to take any chances, Trujillo and Sheldon devised a secret emergency code. If Manny needed to speak to him in person, he called the office and asked for “Mr. Scott.” They would then arrange a time and place to rendezvous. That August, prior to the visit by Stoner and Fields, the two held a rare face-to-face meeting at ANL headquarters. Madole, Trujillo told him, had just asked him to take his motorcycle on an extended recruiting trip throughout the South and Midwest to convince other nationalist groups to ally with the NRP. To increase his legitimacy with racist groups, Trujillo joined the New York chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.²⁶

Trujillo also informed a startled Sheldon that he had persuaded someone to help him: Irene Dovale. Like Trujillo’s, Dovale’s background is murky. In all probability she was born to a German mother in New York around 1935. A member of the Communist Labor Youth League, she likely met Trujillo either while taking classes at the Jefferson School or hanging out at the same motorcycle bars, or both. What we do know is that the militant feminist decided to help him fight fascism. She joined the NRP as Ruth Ross and on September 25 appeared at a street meeting dressed in a storm-trooper uniform. Trujillo introduced her as his “sister” and Madole was delighted when she offered to organize a women’s unit. “Ross,” wrote an ANL observer who did not know her true identity, seemed especially “concerned with male chauvinism.” Her feminism did not bother Madole, for he knew that having pretty young women in the NRP would attract more young men. To ensure her loyalty, Madole helped his unemployed new member secure a secretarial job.²⁷

Trujillo and Dovale hosted regular inner-circle meetings at his apartment on Audubon Avenue. Trujillo carefully staged his living room to impress his fellow Nazis. The twenty members who entered his abode on October 10 were greeted with the sounds of Nazi music playing in the background. As they looked around, they saw a map of Germany and pictures of Hitler and Mussolini hanging on the wall and beer, soda, and snacks laid out on the coffee table. True to her word, Dovale showed up in full uniform accompanied by a new female recruit. She would grow the women’s division one recruit at a time—even if those recruits were secretly communists. On evenings when Trujillo traveled out of town to work with Frederick Weiss on the NR Bulletin, Dovale ran the meetings.²⁸

By early November, Dovale was confident enough to declare herself “leader of the [NRP] girls’ group.” When asked at a meeting of local fascists why she had been selected for the position, Dovale calmly responded, “I knew more about National Socialism than all the other girls put together. My Mother was a Nazi … she taught me all about it, and also that I was sick and tired of seeing how the Jews were taking over all the Gentile businesses.”²⁹

For many of the regular Wednesday night attendees, politics and entertainment merged into one. Trujillo understood that men and women who socialized together were more likely to remain committed to the cause than those who did not. A series of surviving snapshots of gatherings in his apartment shows party members eating, drinking, talking, and, in Madole’s case, even smiling.

[picture]

Ruth Ross (Irene Dovale) and NRP members meet at Trujillo’s apartment (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

None of the Nazis gathered in Trujillo’s apartment knew that many of their meetings were being secretly recorded. Anxious to avoid accusations of conspiring with communists, Sheldon informed local FBI agents E. A. Brandt and James Martin that he was running an undercover operation with the man Nazis knew as Mana Truhill. “I observed that we had reserved the right to record meetings in Truhill’s home and had done so on one or two occasions.” Sheldon hired someone to convert Trujillo’s “telephone line into a live microphone, which picked up every sound in the room, even when the phone was on the hook.” Entire meetings were captured on a tape recorder and the evidence was turned over to the FBI.³⁰

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Ruth Ross playing records at Trujillo’s apartment (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

The private apartment meetings gave Trujillo and Dovale a better insight into Madole’s long-range thinking. They warned Sheldon that the New York Nazi was sounding increasingly like J. B. Stoner. The “Jews crucified Jesus like they [were] trying to crucify him,” Madole had complained at one meeting. As far as he was concerned, “Hitler [was] like Jesus” and his loyal minions were once again being persecuted by Jews. But there was hope. Madole spoke of his plans to convince the world’s Aryans to work together and take over governments in Canada and Europe. Once that was done, he would turn to the Middle East, where “Arabs would be encouraged to wipe out the Jews.”³¹

For all the valuable information Trujillo provided, Sheldon never fully trusted the avowed communist or his red “sister.” Operating on a need-to-know basis, he rarely revealed the identity of his undercover agents to one another. Trujillo’s public and private meetings were initially observed and reported on by two agents: ANL spy Jon Langrod, who posed as a college student interested in knowing more about nationalist movements, and BBB, a British reporter who secretly worked for Abe Shoenfeld. Although most of his reports went straight to the AJC’s spy chief, the agent occasionally sent information to a grateful Sheldon.

Whatever suspicion Sheldon may have harbored about Trujillo, the prospect of obtaining inside information about ongoing renazification efforts in Europe, South America, Australia, and the Middle East proved too great a lure. Like his counterparts at the ADL and AJC, Sheldon feared the NRP’s potential international impact more than its domestic influence. As early as April 1947, the ANL leader warned of the “existence of a carefully organized, well-planned and fairly well financed underground pro-German movement, in the United States” with close “ties in the Allied Zones in Germany” and with worldwide ambitions, including the genocide of Jews in Palestine.³²

Madole’s hope for a revived international Nazi movement was no mere dream. The Nazi diaspora was real and threatening, especially in Germany. By 1951, Socialist Reich Party leader Otto Ernst Remer, the Wehrmacht general who had crushed the anti-Hitler putsch in July 1944, called for the creation of a Fourth Reich. “I do not conceal the fact that we are making an appeal especially to the former Nazis. We want them; we need them, and we know that they were not always such bad fellows.” That summer, the openly Nazi party received 367,000 votes just in Lower Saxony and its representatives attended a World Convention of Neo-Fascists held in Malmö, Sweden. Following their initial success, Remer’s coleader, the much beloved Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, traveled to Argentina, Spain, and other parts of the world hoping to unite former Reich leaders. They and their allies repeatedly looked to James Madole and Frederick Weiss for financial aid. They also admired the NRP for its courageous publications. Few American organizations would dare print an article entitled “Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation,” as they did in the October 1952 issue of the NR Bulletin.³³

Madole’s desire to lead a worldwide alliance of Nazis and fascists proved a golden opportunity for Trujillo to rise up even further in the party. When the ambitious führer learned that Trujillo was fluent in German, he placed him in charge of all overseas correspondence. Sheldon could not believe his good fortune. Here was a rare chance to obtain evidence of Nazi plans to revive Hitler’s fallen glory. Trujillo’s international correspondents considered the NR Bulletin and the party’s Overseas Division a safe “American clearinghouse” to communicate with one another. It was a safe space until Trujillo took it over.³⁴

In early November, Trujillo began working with Frederick Weiss writing articles for the Bulletin and producing fascist flyers for distribution here and abroad. Weiss, Trujillo told Sheldon, was the brains, as well as the money, behind the Nazi organization. The wealthy German enjoyed talking with him in his mother tongue and found the NRP’s rising star far brighter than its leader. Trujillo had spent the last years of the war in Germany and, despite apologizing for his “poor Hamburg German,” was fluent enough to read, write, and speak with no problem, something Madole could not do. After many weekends working together at his farm in Middletown, sixty miles from Manhattan, the cultured Heidelberg- and Sorbonne-trained industrialist came to trust and admire the German-speaking half-Apache—enough to confess that he found Madole “much too shrill in his anti-Semitism,” and deplored “the obnoxious caricatures of Jews peddled by street-corner rowdies in New York.”³⁵

Weiss wanted someone more sophisticated like Trujillo in charge of the NRP. Rather than disrupt operations by replacing Madole, Weiss turned over his substantial mailing list of Nazi leaders scattered around the world to the NRP’s newly appointed director of overseas operations and asked him to write to them in German to assess what was happening in their countries and what kind of aid they needed—be it money, weapons, or connections to like-minded men. Receiving this kind of information was an intelligence agent’s ultimate dream. Although many Americans preferred to forget about the war and move on with their lives, defeated Nazis and fascists throughout the world were planning their postwar revenge: they would forge an international alliance that would achieve what Hitler had not been able to, a Jew-free world. And they hoped Mana Truhill would help them move closer to that goal. With the American government already bringing Nazi scientists to the United States to fight the Soviet menace, the possibility of establishing a Nazi beachhead in the United States seemed possible.³⁶

Weiss was a well-known figure in European fascist circles, mainly because he had been supplying key members of the Nazi diaspora with funds and information since the end of World War II. By 1953, ADL operatives reported he had “contacts in virtually all parts of the world, and not merely obscure crackpots in remote corners, but leading fascists, anti-Semites, and extreme nationalists.” Compared “to his big-time contacts abroad,” ADL agents informed Arnold Forster, “Weiss is a minor figure.” But “if one measures the extent of Weiss’s contacts and his energy as a dispenser of extreme nationalistic, anti-Semitic propaganda, he emerges as an operator of some consequence.” His regular correspondents included Einar Aberg, head of the Swedish Anti-Jewish Combat League; Per Engdahl, Sweden’s leading antisemite and organizer of the 1951 World Convention of Neo-Fascists; Arnold Leese, leader of the British Imperial Fascist League; the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; and the three founders of Germany’s Socialist Reich Party: Otto Remer, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and Nazi-era student leader Gerhard Krüger. Mana Truhill was soon corresponding with all of them.³⁷

During the next several months, Trujillo made repeated visits to Weiss’s farmhouse, often accompanied by Irene Dovale. The pair worked with the German émigré writing articles for the Bulletin—often under Madole’s name—and sending propaganda material to their foreign correspondents. Trujillo impressed Weiss by working into the early hours of the morning. Many of those hours, however, were spent rifling through Weiss’s wastebasket and taping together torn-up letters and documents that he then turned over to Sheldon—just as Stetson Kennedy had done in the Columbians’ office years earlier.³⁸

Far more important, however, was the information Sheldon’s agent provocateur gleaned from his intimate contact with Nazis and fascists abroad. Trujillo assumed his position as the NRP’s chief foreign correspondent in October 1953 and soon became the face of Nazi America for many of the world’s leading fascists. By April 1954, Sheldon’s remarkable spy was regularly corresponding with 148 major worldwide figures and dozens of minor Nazi functionaries—many of them recipients of Weiss’s financial largesse.³⁹

Trujillo’s correspondents slowly came to trust him and reveal secrets they would never articulate in public. He probably communicated with more major Nazi leaders than any American nationalist or government agency. His correspondents shared a common desire to forge a united international fascist front like they had achieved in Europe during the 1930s and early 1940s. And they saw Mana Truhill as someone who could help them do that. With Trujillo sending thousands of copies of the NR Bulletin and antisemitic pamphlets throughout the world, his correspondents came to see the NRP as more important than it really was. Trujillo portrayed his party as the only American group that openly proclaimed its determination to continue Hitler’s battles for a Jew-free, communist-free world. He also exaggerated their numbers, boasting of 1,100 members just in New York City (another time he claimed 7,000), as well as 600 highly trained men and women who belonged to its Elite Guard.⁴⁰

Sheldon wanted the NRP’s overseas director to assess the strength of the German renazification movement and track similar efforts at fascist revivals around the world. Despite the rhetoric of denazification being preached by German leaders such as Chancellor Konrad Adenhauer, many of Hitler’s former government officials returned to power following the creation of West Germany in 1949. By 1951, 35 percent of the high-ranking officials in the German Foreign Office were former members of the Nazi party. Worse yet, many ordinary Germans longed for a return to the glory days of National Socialism. An American-sponsored public opinion poll conducted in the fall of 1951 found that 42 percent of the 1,200 persons polled considered that there had been more good than evil in Nazism, compared to 37 percent who saw in it more evil than good. The remaining 21 percent expressed no opinion.⁴¹

Men who had held important positions in Hitler’s government, men who ordinarily would not have bothered with a seemingly small New York operation, welcomed whatever news and literature they could obtain. Many trusted Trujillo and the NRP because they had little choice. Given restrictions on what could be written or said publicly in Germany, they believed the United States would be the center of any successful effort to forge a worldwide fascist alliance. Former Nazi storm-trooper leader Otto Mahncke, who was building a right-wing political movement in Hamburg called the Freedom Party, told Truhill that his party’s progress was being hindered by German laws that prevented him from saying anything “concerning the Jews … otherwise I would be immediately arrested.” All circulars and written material attacking Jews were seized by authorities and their authors were sentenced to five to ten years in prison.⁴²

Given these legal restrictions, Mahncke insisted the “only way we can accomplish anything is with help from abroad”—help from groups like the NRP, which could supply him and his allies across the world with money, propaganda, contacts, and inside information about the progress being made by American fascists. That February, Trujillo sent 3,000 copies of the latest Bulletin to Mahncke’s strongholds in Hamburg, Hameln, Hanover, and Stuttgart. “I have taken Mana to my heart,” the grateful Nazi wrote.⁴³

Few of Trujillo’s correspondents proved more important than Johann von Leers, one of Hitler’s “leading theoreticians with regard to racial doctrines and anti-Semitism” who now served as a leader in the international neo-Nazi movement. German minister of propaganda and enlightenment Joseph Goebbels had been so impressed by the former university professor’s antisemitic writings that he had appointed him a major in the SS’s Race Office. Leers became one of Germany’s most important ideologues, publishing twenty-seven books between 1933 and 1945, many dealing with the Jewish Question. Proficient in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Hungarian, and Arabic, Leers fled to Argentina after the war and edited one of the world’s leading postwar Nazi periodicals, Der Weg (The Way). The German government considered the “openly pro-Nazi magazine” dangerous enough to ban it in May 1949.44

Trujillo’s correspondents supplied him with an intimate view of Nazi plans for the future, information that he sent to Sheldon, who passed it on to the FBI and CIA. Like Mahncke and Leers, Nazi leaders believed the United States would be where the “decisive battle for the whole mankind [would] be fought.” Leers wrote that he remained “deeply convinced that the idea of the NRP will triumph—and that is extremely necessary, for the greatest power of the Jews is concentrated in the States, and Jewish world power can be overthrown only there.” Fascists throughout the world, he told Truhill, “are deeply interested in the fight of the nationalist, anti-Jewish forces in [the] USA.” To that end, he asked the NRP’s overseas director to send him precise information about “existing anti-Jewish organizations, their approximate numbers, and their periodicals and programs in the USA.” In exchange, he promised to circulate the NR Bulletin and NRP flyers among the more than 1,000 key leaders on his mailing list.⁴⁵

Nazis such as Mahncke and Leers embraced Truhill not only because of their near daily correspondence but because they admired his militantly antisemitic flyers and Bulletin articles that praised Nazi leaders like Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. His Himmler tribute earned Trujillo a personal fan letter from the Nazi’s daughter, Gudrun. “The article concerning my father is really very good,” she wrote in March 1954, “and for us it is amazing that something of that nature can be written in America, for in Germany of today nobody would dare publish anything of a positive nature concerning my father.”⁴⁶

Make no mistake, Trujillo’s fascist correspondents used him for their own ends. For one thing, they could ask questions in private letters that they could never raise in public: how could they obtain weapons, money, and the names of potential allies? Trujillo and Weiss provided men like Mahncke with the latter two; weapons proved more difficult. Mana told his correspondents that the NRP’s New York branch used “knives and clubs” in their street battles but not guns. Their chapter in Trion, Georgia, however, had assembled an arsenal that included German Lugers, Mauser machine pistols and rifles, and a number of .32 pistols. It was not enough to launch a race war, but it was a start. Determined to help Mahncke, Elite Guard head Hans Schmidt promised to “see if there is any way that I may help to put weapons in your hands for your brave fight against the Jewish Bonn Government.”⁴⁷

Only one of Trujillo’s notable correspondents rejected his overtures to join a trans-Atlantic alliance, longtime British fascist leader Oswald Mosely. “Unfortunately,” his secretary wrote to Truhill that March, “we do not find much in common between the policy of Our Movement and that of the NRP which is very much more extreme on racial matters, and seems to be possessed of a romantic nostalgia for German National Socialism.” Mosely was convinced that following public revelations about genocidal Nazi death camps, denying the murder of six million Jews would repulse all but the most rabid antisemites. Far-right voters were more likely to be drawn to a party preaching a milder racial and religious agenda.⁴⁸

Mosely may not have cared for Madole’s program, but the three founding members of the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party—Gerhard Krüger, Otto Ernst Remer, and Frederick Weiss’s longtime friend Hans-Ulrich Rudel—embraced the NRP and its overseas director. ADL and AJC agents in Europe had been monitoring the trio’s public activities, but only Trujillo communicated with them on a regular basis. Calling Krüger “an important wheel in the present Nazi propaganda set-up in Germany,” Sheldon asked his agent to find out everything they were planning. They, in turn, loved receiving information they believed was not polluted by the worldwide Jewish-dominated media. “The fight here for the real national interests of the German people is now without any doubt much stronger” than in the past, Krüger wrote to Truhill. The former student union leader under the Hitler regime implored his American correspondent to visit Germany and see what they were up against.⁴⁹

Trujillo’s correspondents shared a common desire to defeat the worldwide Jewish–communist threat. Friedrich Kuhfuss, onetime head of Hamburg’s German Workers’ Party who had fled to Spain after the war, urged Truhill and the NRP to make it “clear to every right man of any nation that it is time to put aside any feelings of national rancor. The Jew, and the Jew only, has been able to put us against each other, if we do not see our real foe in the Jew and his organizations, if the Jew goes on having success in putting nation against nation our fight will be lost.” Fellow fascists might differ as to strategies but that “should be of second importance, the main things should be: FIGHT AS BEST YOU CAN, no matter if German or French or Englishman.”⁵⁰

Trujillo’s correspondents warned him to be alert for Jewish spies. Johann von Leers cautioned Mana to beware of Professor James Sheldon, whose “real name is ‘Shappiro’ … he is a rather well known jew.” The Buenos Aires–based Nazi proposed a course of action to thwart Sheldon’s group: “Send a man of yours, who is not known, as a spy into that Anti-Nazi League, to become a member of it and to spy out what the rascals are doing, especially what communist affiliations they have. Then it would be easy to destroy their activities.”⁵¹

Leers also offered Trujillo perceptive advice on building a successful Nazi movement in the United States. “Avoid clashes in New York,” he wrote that March, “bring your activity more to the agricultural regions, to the Middle west and to the South. Study eagerly the situation of the American farmer. Here is the real victim of Jewish money-power.” National Socialism in Germany had only succeeded “when the peasant came to us, and even now under the beastly oppression of nine years, in the peasantry strongholds of National Socialism have remained. Like the giant Antaiso in the classical legend you will always get new strength from the maternal soil of the rural population.”⁵²

By spring 1954, Emmanuel Trujillo had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Not only was he trusted by Madole, Weiss, and a series of important foreign correspondents, but that April Otto Mahncke appointed him the official American agent for the Gemeinschaft Schwarz-Weiss-Rot (Black-White-Red Party)—a position to which he devoted considerable time. Joining forces with rising neo-Nazi movements, he also became a member of Germany’s Sozialistische Reichspartei and Deutsche Reichspartei.⁵³

Mana Truhill could not stop the resurgence of international fascism, but he could try to slow it down. During the course of his correspondence with myriad international and domestic groups, he discovered “the closely knit relationship between nearly all of the movements in this category, both in the United States and abroad, including relationships in Germany, Switzerland, England, Italy, Spain, the Middle East, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, etc.” He sent copies of incoming and outgoing letters (which he translated from German to English) to Sheldon, who in turn sent them to the Department of Justice, the attorney general of New York, Army and Navy intelligence agencies, and the CIA. The ANL leader also spent two hours that July reviewing all the documents with local FBI special agents E. A. Brandt and Jim Martin.⁵⁴

Sheldon and Trujillo believed his best work was yet to come. In November 1953, at Weiss’s urging (and with his financial largesse), Trujillo began writing his correspondents of plans to visit Germany, Spain, Sweden, and possibly the Middle East during the summer of 1954. Weiss also promised to send his beloved overseas director to a conference in Rome being organized by Italian fascists that June. The latter invitation was the work of former convict Larry Sestito, American agent for the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), head of the NRP’s New Jersey branch, and Sheldon’s latest undercover operative. News of Truhill’s upcoming visit thrilled his correspondents. Here was a chance to talk frankly with an important American fascist without having to put anything on paper or being overheard saying something that might lead to their arrest.⁵⁵

Ironically, Trujillo proved to be too good at his job. He unintentionally helped unify a scattered international Nazi movement by putting those major leaders in touch with one another. Before Trujillo, Nazi and fascist friends had written to one another, but not to people outside their trusted network; there were too many spies who could send them to jail. Trujillo transformed the NRP’s Overseas Division into a central intelligence agency for international fascism. And now, he planned to strengthen those ties by meeting his numerous correspondents at the fascist gathering in Rome. He had inadvertently made a united international fascist front more possible than ever before.

Trujillo’s European networking trip was delayed by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, 1954, a ruling that legally ended the Jim Crow era of segregation. Seizing on the opportunity to expand the NRP’s national membership, Frederick Weiss bought Trujillo a new motorcycle and Madole authorized him “to visit all friends and supporters of the NRP in the South and the Middle West and to organize the people against the recent unjust decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw racial segregation.” He would begin by visiting his friends Jesse Stoner and Edward Fields. Afterward, Trujillo planned to stop in Trion, Georgia, where he would meet with NRP branch leader Charles Westbrook, who wanted the names of contacts in Germany who could supply him with weapons.⁵⁶

Once the American recruiting trip was completed, Truhill would embark on his European tour and expand the NRP’s reach—and Sheldon’s information—beyond anything either man could have anticipated. By May 1954, an FBI informant told his handlers how Mana Truhill had surpassed Madole and “appears to be in complete charge of all activities of the NRP.” He was the primary organizer “of all the work which is necessary for the preparation and distribution of the antisemitic literature of the NRP.” More importantly, Frederick Weiss “appears to have complete trust in X [Trujillo] and has given him considerable money for his personal needs as well as the expenses of the Party.”⁵⁷

That summer, Trujillo, aided by Irene Dovale and Larry Sestito, appeared on the verge of seizing control of the National Renaissance Party. And then everything fell apart.

9.

Exposed!

Emmanuel Trujillo knew that one day he would be exposed as an undercover agent. He just never expected a Jewish agency to do it. In November 1953, as Trujillo was establishing himself as the face of American Nazism and Irene Dovale was bringing in new female recruits, the Anti-Defamation League Bulletin featured a two-page article about James Madole and his National Renaissance Party. “How Can I Become a Menace” exposed Mana Truhill as a secret communist agent. The Bulletin’s front page featured a picture of Trujillo in the NRP’s Nazi-like uniform and Ruth Ross (Irene Dovale) dressed like a German fräulein in an outfit that featured the NRP’s lightning bolt and swastika emblem.¹

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Ruth Ross, leader of NRP’s women’s division (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

“Several months ago,” the article explained, Trujillo “walked into ADL’s New York office with an offer ‘to sell’ his information about Madole and the National Renaissance party. He said that his real name was Emanuel [sic] Trujillo, that he was a full-blooded Apache Indian and that he had been selling his information to a fringe outfit [the Anti-Nazi League], but was dissatisfied with the ‘financial assistance’ given him. Before departing, Truhill ventured the admission that his personal ideology is ‘out-and-out’ Communist and that he attends Jefferson School, a Communist educational plant.”²

Since his initial visit to the ADL offices, Trujillo had become “boss of the party’s Elite Guard, its storm troopers.” As for Ruth Ross, the ADL knew nothing about her background or undercover work for the ANL. The article simply described her as a woman with “a singular approach to all political issues: she hates Jews.” The ADL could not have been more wrong in their assessment of either NRP member.³

Emmanuel Trujillo wanted to help the Jews in their struggle against Nazism at home and abroad. Instead, he found himself in dire straits, exposed by one of the groups he wanted to aid. His demand for “financial assistance” was in fact a request to be paid a modest stipend for doing undercover work—something the ADL and the American Jewish Committee did for their own undercover operatives. But because Trujillo had openly admitted his connection to the Communist-tainted Jefferson School, Forster had thrown him out of his office and exposed him to the rest of the world—especially the Nazi and fascist world Trujillo and Dovale now inhabited.

It was precisely such unexpected and dangerous circumstances that made James Sheldon partial to employing war veterans. Trujillo proved no exception. He planned on toughing it out and bluffing his way through the anticipated blowback from the ADL article. He knew local Nazis kept in touch with Jewish thinking by reading their periodicals. Fortunately, Trujillo had earned enough trust among Madole, Weiss, and his many foreign correspondents to weather the ADL’s revelations. But how long could he maintain that trust?

James Madole wasted no time defending his right-hand man. “The mere fact that the Jews say that Mr. Truhill is a spy for them, is ample proof to us that he IS NOT!” Madole praised Truhill as “one of the best workers the NRP has ever had. There have been many days that Mr. Truhill has gone without sleep in order to complete a job assigned to him by the party.” The Jews wanted to destroy his reputation because he had succeeded in building a strong base of support among fascists in “Europe, North & South America and especially New York City.” Therefore, it was “only natural that they would try to find some way” to discredit Truhill. Madole would have none of it. “Mr. Truhill is still working with the NRP and will be for many years to come.”⁴

Several weeks after the article appeared, Madole, in a show of defiance, asked Trujillo and Dovale to accompany him to confront James Sheldon in his midtown office. Meeting face-to-face with Sheldon and four ANL officials, he demanded to know why they had asked the Justice Department to put the NRP on its list of subversive organizations. With the wiry Trujillo standing at his side, Madole expressed his contempt for democracy, observing that “most members of the masses were not intelligent enough to be discerning in their political views or actions.” The NRP leader told Sheldon that his party was determined “to change the present democratic form of government, disenfranchise Jews and Negroes,” and would use force “to wipe out those who stand in the way of the majority, the majority being the NRP.”⁵

In an Oscar-worthy performance, Trujillo followed Madole’s threats with even “more vicious remarks.” The NRP’s Bronx and Queens storm-trooper units, he warned, had over 600 members, many of whom were willing to die for the cause. The ANL would never stop them. As they left the office nearly two hours later, Madole, Trujillo, and Dovale congratulated each other on their verbal victory against Sheldon. Trujillo had once again proven his worth to the cause. The Jews be damned!⁶

Trujillo received equally strong backing from his Nazi correspondents. Swedish fascist Einar Aberg, who distributed more antisemitic propaganda through the NRP than any other contact, reassured Truhill that he had his full support. “Naturally the ADL will smear and slander you,” he wrote that February, “because of your telling the truth about the Jewry and that in a way which the Jews chiefly dread, namely by distributing leaflets. The attack of the ADL is a compliment to your work.” Hamburg leader Otto Mahncke rushed to his American friend’s defense, warning him that Kurt Nippe, a former NRP member from Brooklyn, had accused Truhill of being “a fraud” and had sent him fifteen letters warning “against you, against Weiss, and against Madole. Don’t tell Nippe anything. Act as though you know nothing, so that he will not become suspicious.” Other correspondents told Truhill they looked forward to his long-anticipated European trip. Truhill and the NRP, Mahncke noted, were among the few American allies “willing to help … our fight against world Judaism.”⁷

Fearing he might be expelled because of the ADL accusations, Trujillo made a bold move to seize control of the party from James Madole. On January 21, 1954, he sent out an “Important Notice” to his personal mailing list of 700, as well as to the NRP’s main list, announcing “the appointment of myself Mana Truhill as the leader of the National Renaissance Party as a result of exposing a Jewish plot to destroy our party.” He blamed Madole and Weiss for failing to stop Jewish spies from penetrating the NRP and selling out the party “for thirty pieces of silver.” Truhill named Jon Langrod, the immigrant son of Polish resistance fighters (who also worked for Sheldon) as his assistant leader, and Ruth Ross as the party’s new secretary. He ended the letter, “Yours for a better party. Mana Truhill.”⁸

Under most circumstances, such a declaration would have earned a fast counter response from Madole and Weiss. But these were no ordinary circumstances. The canny Weiss had more faith in his ability to control Trujillo than in Madole’s ability to lead the NRP. Whatever his true identity, Mana Truhill had proven a valuable asset in corresponding with foreign contacts. They trusted him and confided their secret plans for creating fascist parties that would establish a German Reich free of Jews and communists. When an American Jewish Committee spy embedded in the NRP asked Weiss about Truhill’s alleged red background, the German leader responded, “We use all kinds of characters. We have such a shortage of leaders. I would use the very Devil himself if I thought it would help get us what we are after.”⁹

Madole proved less clear-headed than Weiss. The twenty-seven-year-old bachelor and likely virgin had fallen in love with the woman he knew as Ruth Ross. As the lovesick führer confided to Trujillo, “Going out with her to occasional shows and dinners meant a great deal to me and greatly eased the tension of constant reading and writing.” Madole asked Ruth to share a Manhattan apartment with him and his mother. But when he learned of Ruth’s plans to become the NRP’s next führer, Madole had an “atomic explosion” and told her to resign her position. He soon calmed down and begged her forgiveness. “I have been very unhappy since our quarrel,” he wrote, and he hoped she would “forgive my anger and to forget what I said about leaving our party.” Madole’s mother was equally enamored of Ruth and upset that the two had quarreled. Grace Madole, observed one FBI informant, was highly “influential in directing the NRP through her son” and did not want to see him fall out with such a militant and capable antisemite.¹⁰ In the end, mother and son decided to forgive Truhill and Ross for their attempted takeover, ascribing it to a fit of insanity brought on by the ADL Bulletin article.

Ross accepted the apology but declined the offer to move in with son and mother. Tired of the long trek from Beacon, James and Grace took a small one-bedroom apartment at 10 West Ninetieth Street, just off of Central Park West.

Despite the seeming reproachment, Abe Shoenfeld’s agents reported that Truhill’s attempted takeover had created considerable confusion within the NRP. Madole was still the organization’s titular head, but his daily leadership was “superseded by Mana Truhill.” To deflect any suspicion, Trujillo began pushing the NRP to become “more violently Hitlerite” and used the NR Bulletin to feature “revolting caricatures of Jews which out-rivalled those of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher.”¹¹ Sheldon’s undercover agent was doing too good a job to be dismissed because of what Madole believed were Jewish lies.

Over the next several months, Trujillo’s success in building close relationships with international Nazi and fascist leaders blunted any suspicions raised by the ADL accusations. Whatever doubts he may have harbored, Frederick Weiss continued funding the NRP and spending weekends working with Trujillo at his farmhouse writing dozens of articles and flyers—most of which were published under Madole’s name.

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Truhill working on National Renaissance Bulletin (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision proved a godsend to the NRP and especially to Emmanuel Trujillo. Rendered on May 17, 1954, the 9–0 decision outlawed racial discrimination in public schools, effectively declaring the principle of separate but equal unconstitutional—thereby ending decades of legal segregation established under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The decision, noted George Kellman, the AJC leader who now oversaw Abe Shoenfeld’s undercover operation, sparked “an immediate rise in anti-Semitic and anti-Negro agitation.”¹²

Like Emory Burke, Homer Loomis Jr., and Jesse B. Stoner, James Madole envisioned himself leading a united fascist coalition. Southern reactions to the court decision offered a chance to realize that dream by allying with nationalist groups determined to resist the attack on their sacred racial traditions. “We can take advantage of the isolationist and pro-Nationalist sentiment in the West and the South,” Madole wrote to supporters, “to build a tremendous mass movement which will rouse public opinion and snowball its way back to the East.”¹³

Fortunately for Madole, the hard-working Trujillo had established an extensive network of domestic as well as foreign correspondents. By the end of 1953, he was sharing ideas about the country’s racial future with nationalists in twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. Charles Hamilton, head of the St. Louis–based National Citizens Protective Association, saw the NRP as an ally “working for the same thing—to make the Aryan Race, Race conscious. Hitler achieved that goal in Germany and we must do it here.” Creating a Nazi-like America was no fantasy for Madole. Charles Westbrook, Elite Guard commander for NRP chapters in Georgia and Kentucky, had been gathering a “private arsenal” of weapons long before the May decision. Now that the court had spoken, Westbrook wrote to Truhill asking for the addresses of “German gun making companies or German firms that handle pistols.” He was preparing for a new civil war.¹⁴

Throughout the spring and summer of 1954, thousands of angry Southerners joined a resurgent Ku Klux Klan and organized dozens of groups to resist the court decision. Westbrook’s desire for violence was echoed by Millard Grubbs, editor of Louisville’s American Eagle. Insisting that “drastic action is necessary to properly rouse the White people to the disaster which threatens,” he urged that all “white skunks who would sell their race and civilization for Jewish bribe-money should be indicted for treason and publicly shot.”¹⁵

The subsequent upsurge of Southern resistance provided opportunities for the NRP to forge new North–South alliances. Trujillo wasted no time contacting important Southern allies like Stoner and Fields. Although a year had passed since their New York visit, Trujillo received regular reports from them as well as updates on their activities from Lanier Waller, who still spied on the pair.¹⁶

Like Madole, Frederick Weiss saw an opportunity to expand the NRP into the Deep South and across the Southwest. He wanted Trujillo to meet with nationalist groups in Dayton, Louisville, St Louis, Chicago, and Detroit. That would be followed by a second trip to cities and towns in Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Kansas, and finally Washington D.C.¹⁷

Wasting no time, Trujillo used Weiss’s money to buy a motorcycle and begin planning his extended trip. On June 5, Madole gave him a letter on NRP stationery authorizing him to meet with supporters in the South and the Middle West and “organize the people against the recent unjust decision of the US Supreme Court to outlaw racial segregation … You are empowered to organize the people and to act as an advisor to local leaders in setting up a nation-wide protest of this unjust ruling.”¹⁸

Anxious to leave a trail of violence that would ignite Southerners, Madole and Weiss ordered Trujillo to help local groups “start riots and start militant resistance to the anti-segregation law.”¹⁹ The two NRP leaders hoped an alliance of Northern and Southern fascists might prove powerful enough to stop Jewish and Black efforts at integration. At the very least, it would provide the NRP with a Southern base from which it could expand its political movement.

Once the motorcycle tour was completed, Weiss promised to send Trujillo on his long-delayed European tour to forge closer relationships with former German SS officers. Despite everything, Weiss trusted Trujillo and continued funding his activities.²⁰

Madole seized the racially fraught moment to heighten his antisemitic rhetoric. Not only did he ramp up his attacks on President Dwight D. Eisenhower—whom he referred to as “Ike the Kike”—and proclaim Senator Joe McCarthy the savior of Christian America, but he also embraced the same Christian Identity rhetoric employed by J. B. Stoner. “Nothing is more important to the Jew,” he told followers, than keeping Christians “convinced of the myth that the Jews are God’s own people, thus enabling them to gain their long-wished-for position as rulers of the world.” Nothing could be further from God’s truth. “Christ was crucified because He told the Jews the uncontested truth: ‘Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do,’” he wrote, quoting the Gospel of St. John 8:44. Only when this myth “no longer receives support by us Christians” would God’s true people find the road “that leads to liberation from the fatal influence of the Jews the world over.” Madole ended his screed by insisting that “Anti-Semitism is not persecution of the Jews. Anti-Semitism is Self-defense of the individual and of the people.”²¹

Tipped off by informants (usually Sheldon and his agents), the FBI took Madole’s plans for inciting Southern violence seriously. The Bureau feared that Trujillo’s motorcycle trips, coming at a moment of peak racial tensions, could expand the NRP’s reach “particularly in the South by affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan–type organizations.” The New York office asked J. Edgar Hoover to alert all FBI branches “for any information indicating this organization is involved in racial disturbances.”²²

The discord and disruptions created by the ADL article were scotched over by the prospect of a Nazi–Southern alliance. But Weiss warned members to beware of further Jewish efforts to undermine the NRP. “There are spies in this organization; you have got to watch your files; they take your stuff and report to Professor Sheldon, that I know. The Professor doesn’t report to FBI; he reports directly to [U.S. Attorney General Herbert] Brownell.” Weiss was partially correct. Sheldon had asked Brownell to place the NRP on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. But Sheldon also worked closely with the FBI—and that proved extraordinarily troubling for the ANL leader in the spring of 1954.23

In a rare concession to its liberal members, Congress authorized the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1954 to investigate “Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups” in America. HUAC was the brainchild of Jewish congressman Samuel Dickstein who, after a troubling visit to Germany in 1933, called on Congress to scrutinize fascist activities in the United States. In 1934, Dickstein’s House colleagues agreed to create such a committee, but only if it also examined communist activities. Despite its pledge to spend equal time on both, the committee focused 75 percent of its subsequent investigations in the 1930s and ’40s on alleged communist activity in the United States. Now it promised to investigate threats from the far right.²⁴

The newly revived House committee asked J. Edgar Hoover to provide them with information on American Nazis and fascists. With the Bureau still focusing on investigating alleged communists, Hoover’s men had obtained little useful evidence on their own. Consequently, New York agents set up their base of operations inside the friendly confines of the American Jewish Committee. George Kellman, now in charge of the AJC’s Investigative and Fact-Finding Division, turned over Abe Shoenfeld’s spy reports. Bureau agents also visited the offices of the ADL, compiling information on fascist activities that could prove useful to the committee.²⁵

When FBI agents approached James Sheldon that spring, the ANL head found himself torn between loyalty to his undercover operatives and loyalty to his country. How much could he—should he—tell the FBI agents? Sheldon had been providing the Bureau with useful information about American Nazis since the early 1940s and about Madole and Weiss since the NRP’s formation in 1949. During a visit on May 16, 1954, the former professor felt compelled to tell them about his latest agent, Emmanuel Trujillo. The army veteran, he explained, had volunteered his services after hearing Madole’s street-corner speech. Since then, he had supplied the ANL with a continuous array of neo-Nazi literature, which Sheldon turned over to the FBI.

Sheldon was cooperative but not entirely honest with the agents. Knowing how red-obsessed Hoover’s men were, he feared that revealing Trujillo’s communist background would taint the spy and the ANL. Consequently, he minimized his agent’s current role. Sheldon knew Madole still embraced Trujillo, but after the ADL exposé, he told the FBI he “considered his effectiveness completely lost.” That was a lie. Trujillo was compromised but still highly effective. Sheldon did not want to risk FBI leaks to right-wing columnists like Westbrook Pegler who delighted in demonizing the ANL as the “Jewish Gestapo.” Fearing his operation might be coming to an end, Sheldon contacted Trujillo that afternoon and urged him to ask Weiss to send him to the international fascist congress being held in Rome on June 24–26. He hoped Trujillo could meet his many foreign correspondents before their undercover operation imploded.²⁶

Trujillo never made it to Europe. That July, as HUAC’s investigation heated up, FBI special agents E. A. Brandt and Jim Martin once again spent several hours with Sheldon discussing the rise of ultranationalist groups like the NRP. When queried about Trujillo’s role, Sheldon insisted that Manny was not his employee, but merely an informant. Trujillo had given him “not more than three or four written reports all together.” That was another lie; there were dozens of reports. The agents were surprised that Sheldon knew more about the activities of Nazis and fascists scattered around the world than the Bureau did. In a show of good faith, he gave them a list of 100 foreign contacts maintained by the NRP and asked the agents to forward it to the CIA.²⁷

Sheldon shaded the truth about another recently recruited operative, twenty-four-year-old Larry Sestito. The American-born son of Italian fascist parents joined the NRP in June 1953 after serving a four-year sentence in New Jersey’s Rahway prison for armed robbery. He had read about the NRP while in prison and, once released, had approached the group offering his services. He and Trujillo soon became good friends, so much so that the ANL operative persuaded Madole to appoint the ex-con as head of the New Jersey NRP. Sestito, he pointed out, was the American agent for the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano and could provide the NRP with important contacts in Italy and in the Italian American community.²⁸

Political loyalties can be tricky things, changed by the most unexpected circumstances. In this instance, former fascist Sestito decided to switch sides after falling in love with the woman he initially knew as Ruth Ross. “Sestito is going haywire,” Abe Shoenfeld learned from one of his operatives. “The girl has got him gaga.” In May 1954, after getting engaged to Ross/Dovale and learning that she and Trujillo were working undercover for the ANL, Sestito approached James Sheldon and volunteered his services.²⁹

In subsequent meetings with the Bureau, Sheldon said nothing about Sestito’s amorous relationship with Ross/Dovale or his close working relationship with Trujillo. By summer’s end, Sheldon seemed optimistic that his undercover operative had weathered the worst of the ADL’s revelations. The breach with Madole and Weiss was apparently healed and Trujillo’s foreign correspondents were delighted with the information they received from their American friend.

And then, the entire undercover operation went haywire.

The first sign of trouble came when Edward Fields visited New York and took Trujillo up on his earlier offer to stay at his apartment. Unfortunately, Trujillo forgot to change his wall decorations. Instead of the Nazi maps and portraits of Hitler that his NRP friends were used to seeing, Fields found his apartment littered with communist propaganda and pictures of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx. Fearing Trujillo was spying for the Jews, Fields told Stoner to stay away from the NRP until Madole purged his right-hand man from the party. That purge came sooner than either expected.³⁰

In August 1954, H. Keith Thompson, former American agent for General Otto Strasser’s West German neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party and Madole’s proposed congressional candidate, published the first in a series of four articles, “I Am an American Fascist,” in a magazine called Exposé. After recounting his lifelong fascist activism, the Yale graduate exposed the undercover operations run by ADL agents and the un-American spying done by James Sheldon and his “supposed Jewish ‘defense’ group.” The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, he told readers, was “a snakepit for Communists, blackmailers, prostitutes and double agents.”³¹

Thompson accused the ANL and its ace spy Mana Truhill, “an admitted Communist,” of seizing control of the National Renaissance Party, the “most blatantly anti-Semitic of all Nationalist groups in the U.S.” In a backhanded testament to Trujillo’s success, Thompson insisted that the NRP “could have been an important force in American Nationalism,” but that Madole had allowed it “to be infiltrated by every manner of anti-Nationalist agents … [and] materially damaged the security of many European Nationalists.” He also named Ruth Ross, aka Irene Dovale, as another of Sheldon’s paid agents.³²

The “Truhill–Sheldon circus has now been exposed,” Thompson concluded, “but some of the damage remains. Nationalists must be on guard against other Truhills.” He urged Madole to take “firm steps to rid his organization of the cockroaches of the ADL and ANL.” Once he did, Thompson was confident the Nazi leader would “be able to re-group and carry on with more effectiveness.”³³

Madole responded to Thompson’s articles by holding a special street meeting at which he announced the dismissal of two of his Elite Guard storm troopers, Larry Sestito and Mana Truhill. Sestito, he told the angry crowd, “had been working for three organizations: the ADL, the ANL, and a federal organization.” Madole surprised onlookers by declaring his intention to dissolve the National Renaissance Party and replace it with a new “Third [political] Party” that would give its unstinting support to Senator Joseph McCarthy, one of the few American politicians bold enough to confront the “communist-minded Jews now running this country.”³⁴

Reactions from Trujillo’s foreign correspondents were immediate. Otto Mahncke, Trujillo’s closest German contact, sent out letters to everyone on his mailing list declaring that “Mr. Mana Truhill has been permanently excluded from the organization Black White and Red. Mana Truhill has been unmasked as an agent and is to be branded as such. We beg all our American friends to assist us so that a Mana Truhill and others will not be enrolled in any parties. Otto Mahncke.”³⁵

Over the next several weeks, as Madole calmed down from the humiliation of having allowed Jewish spies to penetrate his organization, he changed his mind and decided to keep the NRP running as usual—minus Trujillo, Sestito, and Dovale. However, he and his party suffered another blow when HUAC issued its Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups on December 17, 1954. This was the first time since the end of World War II that HUAC turned its attention away from the Communist menace to focus on right-wing subversion. Yet instead of launching a thorough investigation of the dozens of active American fascist and neo-Nazi groups, the Velde Committee, chaired by Harold H. Velde, a Republican from Illinois, focused solely on two prominent nationalist organizations, Madole’s NRP and Conde McGinley’s semi-monthly paper, Common Sense, which dubbed itself the “nation’s anti-Communist paper,” one that served “loyal and patriotic Americans.”³⁶

Calls by Jewish and Black leaders to investigate antisemitic and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other Southern terrorist organizations were ignored. A disgruntled Abe Shoenfeld observed how government committees eagerly went after Communists but rarely made similar moves “against the Klan and its Klan fronts and fellow travelers.” Those hate-filled organizations were protected by “Dixiecrats and the stand-pat Northern Republican alliance.” The Klan and its allies, AJC national chairman Henry Schultz warned, posed a “far greater” threat to democracy than the two fascist groups singled out by HUAC.³⁷

Instead of several thousand pages of testimony and evidence—as HUAC had produced to document the Communist threat in the 1930s—the Velde report was a scant nineteen pages; the attached appendix brought the total to twenty-nine pages. In an extraordinary effort to cover up the true extent of the fascist threat, the committee held no hearings, nor did it call a single witness to testify. They feared that Madole and Weiss would name the sympathetic politicians with whom they had corresponded, something Weiss had threatened to do if questioned under oath. Instead, the committee relied solely on evidence supplied by investigators who worked closely with the FBI—an organization whose head, J. Edgar Hoover, had a loathing if not hatred for Jews. To its credit, the Velde Committee labeled the NRP as a group that took its agenda “from Fascist and Nazi dictators” and whose publications contained “extensive rehashes of Hitler’s speeches.” The committee estimated the NRP’s core group contained 200 to 700 members.³⁸

HUAC concluded that the NRP, “by its advocacy of force and violence,” had violated the 1940 Smith Act (which declared it illegal for anyone to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government) and urged the Justice Department to prosecute its leaders. Those leaders included James Madole, Frederick Weiss, Larry Sestito, and Mana Truhill, head of its “overseas office.” Velde promised his committee would continue investigating “pro-fascist” groups, but that never happened. The Justice Department took no further action against Madole, the NRP, or any other Nazi or fascist group. Fascism, whether domestic or international, was never seen by government leaders as posing the same threat as communism.³⁹

The vapid Velde report steeled Madole and Weiss for greater militancy. “The Jews and their puppets in Congress,” an unrepentant Madole declared, had tried to “smear us to such an extent that no responsible element of American society would be tempted to join our ranks.” He castigated the committee for not allowing him or Weiss to testify and defend themselves against vicious lies. The bulk of the committee’s evidence came from Jewish “private gestapos” and from Larry Sestito. The NRP’s former New Jersey head was bitter because Irene Dovale had broken her engagement to him, pawned the engagement ring he had given her, and married another man despite being pregnant with Sestito’s child. As for Mana Truhill, Madole defended him as a “soldier of fortune” who did “wonderful work for the NRP but was not above taking bribes from the Anti-Defamation League.” He downplayed Truhill/Trujillo’s duplicity, noting that “agents infiltrate Nationalist organizations as well as Red organizations.” Nevertheless, Madole decided to purge Trujillo, Sestito, and Dovale and carry on his crusade against the Jews.⁴⁰

Emmanuel Trujillo said nothing to the press about being singled out by HUAC as a Nazi leader and former student at the Communist-operated Jefferson School of Social Science. He was silent because at the time of the report’s release, he was spending several weeks in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital after being hit by a car while riding his motorcycle. The injury was so severe that doctors inserted a large steel plate to stabilize a leg that had been broken in two places. “None of the [NRP] ‘boys’ know what took place,” he wrote to Sheldon from his hospital bed. “I will not say anything till I receive some word from you. I will not be able to walk for another month or so they say.”⁴¹

Trujillo kept his word and said nothing to the press about his activities inside the NRP. He kept silent until March 1955, when the latest scandal of the century hit the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. That month, wealthy playboy and oleomargarine heir Mickey Jelke went on trial for allegedly luring nineteen-year-old model Pat Ward into prostitution and turning her into New York’s most famous and high-priced call girl. The Jewish girl from New York’s Lower East Side (born Sandra Wisotsky) had once served as comedienne Martha Raye’s personal secretary and was alleged to have had affairs with numerous celebrities, among them Mickey Rooney and John Carradine. During the trial, she was questioned about her most recent boyfriend, a twenty-five-year-old biker named Emmanuel Trujillo. Newspapers and scandal sheets reported that Trujillo was the same man who had been exposed by the Velde Committee as Mana Truhill, a leader of the Nazi National Renaissance Party. Ward was reluctant to discuss their relationship, claiming that she had left him after a brief six-week affair.

But the damage had been done. After being identified in the national press as a militant Nazi, Trujillo finally broke his silence. He published an account of his undercover work and relationship with Ward titled I Love You, I Hate You: My Six Weeks of Free Love with Pat Ward. Hoping to clear his name, he explained how he had spied for “two long hard years without real compensation from the Anti-Nazi league,” gathering “true facts about the National Renaissance Party.” Working with “Nazis I hate” had started to get to him. That’s when he began his affair with Ward, who he met at a motorcycle bar and then drove to his apartment, “the shabbiest quarters of anyone on Manhattan Island.” After spending days together in bed and nights attending NRP meetings in Manny’s apartment, Ward had joined the Nazi group and even had a brief affair with James Madole. Noting that Pat “couldn’t be faithful to one man if she tried,” Trujillo had begun worrying “just how my name would be used when the case came to trial.”⁴²

Newspaper articles said exactly what he feared. “I was sick with worry. I didn’t like being called a Nazi but no one was paying any attention to me other than by what looked like the obvious facts.” Hoping to clear his name, Trujillo asked Sheldon to make a public statement acknowledging his undercover work on behalf of the ANL. Sheldon refused. “I certainly don’t want to issue any kind of statement to the papers and risk linking the name of our organization with the name of a prostitute, who, at this time, is giving evidence that may send a man to prison.” He also did not want his organization linked to a self-avowed communist.⁴³

Manny was stunned. “I had given up most of my personal life to see the job through.” He had earned no money other than expenses. Trujillo’s initial anger faded after he realized that “Professor S was right. His organization was doing good and if it meant hurting his organization to protect the reputation of one single individual and the individual just happened to be me, there wasn’t very much I could do about it. I had taken the chance and now I would have to take the consequences.” But Trujillo worried that anytime he went for a job, people would refuse to hire him once they realized he was the Nazi in the Pat Ward case. What would be even worse was if “someone hired me just because I was a Nazi. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in cahoots with the kind of people I had given up two years to expose.”⁴⁴

Sheldon promised to help his former operative after the trial was over. But how would Manny pay his bills until then? With no money coming in other than his modest book advance, he was forced to live on “sandwiches, an occasional egg, and I’m lucky if I get a healthy hamburger once a month.”⁴⁵

Ironically, the one person who came to his aid was Frederick Weiss. As early as June 1954, Weiss told an AJC agent he knew James Sheldon was paying Trujillo, Dovale, and Sestito to spy on the group. “I don’t give a hang if he does work for Sheldon; I always used him.” He knew of Trujillo’s communist leanings but did not care because he believed the Soviet Union now shared his desire to rid their nation of the Jewish menace. The Soviets, he insisted, were the first nation “to have successfully eradicated the Jew and the Jews’ influence from their life.” He would ally with anyone—including Reds—if he could hasten the elimination of the Jewish menace. Weiss was grateful that Trujillo had traveled to his farm before the Pat Ward trial and promised to keep his name out of the book he planned to write. He kept that promise. Still believing he could control his one-time ally, Weiss paid Trujillo to travel to Las Vegas in August 1955 and work with nationalists on his behalf.⁴⁶

Remarkably, Trujillo held no grudge against Sheldon and continued sending him reports about his work for Weiss. “Most of the people I am with are reds—they know Weiss for what he is and are still working with him.”⁴⁷

Trujillo’s time with Weiss and Sheldon came to an end in January 1956 when the cash-strapped former agent was arrested in Montreal and sentenced to two years in prison for trying to bring “700 marijuana cigarettes valued at $600” across the border. After getting out of jail, Trujillo returned to New York for a short time and tried making a living by selling marijuana. And then he disappeared. The next sighting came in August 1961, when he met Larry Sestito and some friends from the Communist Party in a Manhattan apartment. Soon afterward, Manny traveled to Cuba to work with Fidel Castro. In July 1963, Madole told his inner circle that Trujillo was still “in Cuba with Castro’s Army.” Although Trujillo was gone, Madole was delighted that Pat Ward had begun attending NRP meetings once again.⁴⁸

Rumors continued to circulate about Trujillo’s activities. But the first substantial report came in 1977, when Reverend Immanuel [sic] Pardeahtan Trujillo founded the Peyote Way Church of God in Klondyke, Arizona. Using peyote as part of his traditional religious ceremonies, Trujillo went on to win a series of court cases against local authorities who tried to end his reliance on psychedelics. His later disciples would include Harvard psychologist and LSD pioneer Timothy Leary.⁴⁹

As for James Madole, he remained undeterred by the negative publicity he had received from the Velde Committee. The lovesick führer even talked of finding Irene Dovale “to save her.” “Strange enough,” observed an AJC operative, “his mother is not against that. It is all very strange. James Madole sleeps with his mother, that is to say, they occupy the same large bed. This mother complex is the first thing that struck me four years ago.”⁵⁰

The NRP’s membership declined for a short time, but Madole resumed indoor meetings in the late spring of 1955, confident the party would regain its position as the nation’s leading Nazi organization. In the meantime, having purged Trujillo, Dovale, and Sestito, he resumed close contact with Jesse B. Stoner and Edward Fields, asking for their help in “building an outright Fascist political mass movement for the first time in American history.” Fields and Stoner promised to do what they could, but their main focus was on organizing Southerners in a violent and deadly bombing campaign against Jews and Blacks—a campaign that would soon gain them national notoriety and a new political party.⁵¹

PART III

NEW ALLIANCES AND THE AGE OF TERROR

10.

Black Monday and the Forging of a New American Fascist Front

For many Southerners, the Brown v. Board of Education decision of May 17, 1954, Black Monday as it was widely known, had the same impact as the firing of the first shot on Fort Sumter in April 1861—only this time it was the North firing upon the South. Both events signaled the start of a civil war in which Southerners and their allies waged a relentless battle against a “liberal” government that wanted to impose its views upon citizens determined to lead their lives the way they always had—free of Black and Jewish influence. They preferred peaceful solutions but planned for a mass, violent response utilizing thousands of armed, angry Americans if their demands were not met.

Leading the battle were four self-proclaimed patriots who had been waging a war against Jewish and Black domination since the end of World War II: Jesse B. Stoner, Emory Burke, James Madole, and a dynamic new figure on the extreme right, former navy commander George Lincoln Rockwell. Just as their forefathers had stood up against the British in 1776 and the Union Army in 1861, so, too, would they fight to save their beloved nation from the Northern forces that sought to end their way of life. As Circuit Court Judge Tom P. Brady told the Sons of the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, shortly after the Brown decision, “We have through our forefathers, died before for our sacred principles. We can, if necessary, die again. You shall not mongrelize our children and grandchildren!” It was precisely this fear of mongrelization—of intermarriage or sex between white women and Jews or Blacks that would dilute the white race—that incited widespread fear and action in many parts of the country.¹

For J. B. Stoner and Emory Burke, Black Monday presented an opportunity to revive their thwarted crusades. These men, aided by James Madole, had been spewing their racist and antisemitic venom since war’s end to a relatively small group of Americans. Their initial efforts were often foiled by evidence government authorities received from the AJC, ADL, and ANL. As a result, Burke and Homer Loomis Jr. spent time in jail, while Stoner’s two anti-Jewish parties, as well as Madole’s National Renaissance Party, never attracted enough supporters to become powerful national forces. But their fortunes changed after May 17, 1954.

Stoner, Burke, Madole, and Rockwell believed that large numbers of Americans were now ready to follow their lead. According to a 1956 American Institute of Public Opinion poll, 90 percent of white Southerners disapproved of the Brown decision. If these four godfathers of White Supremacy could convince Northerners and Midwesterners that they could preserve segregation and reverse the Brown decision, success was possible.²

Stoner saw himself as an American patriot who could solve the nation’s racial problems if only people would listen to him. He was delighted when angry Southerners began forming White Citizens Councils (WCC) that opposed the integration of local schools. Comprised of middle- and upper-class businessmen, professionals, planters, bankers, and local officials, these councils saw themselves as respectable alternatives to the Ku Klux Klan and pledged to achieve their goals through economic pressure and legal means. Respectability, however, had its limits. Although publicly eschewing violence, many WCC members still engaged in it and became known as the “uptown Klan,” “white-collar Klan,” or “country club Klan.”³

The WCCs quickly spread into a mass movement of 300,000 to 500,000 men and women. Members were not reactionary “rednecks” but included powerful politicians such as Democratic senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi. By 1958, American Jewish Committee investigators placed the figure at nearly 1 million.⁴

Jewish leaders in New York were paying close attention to the rapid expansion of White Citizens Councils. The AJC did not have any full-time spies embedded in the WCCs, but they did have two sources that reported back to New York headquarters. During the mid-1950s Abe Shoenfeld recruited another New York–based journalist who worked for right-wing periodicals. In 1957, he traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee, to cover organizing efforts to forge a new White Supremacist coalition. “Reporter B” (not Mario Buzzi) sent his insider accounts to Shoenfeld, who passed them on to George Kellman, now in charge of undercover operations for the AJC.⁵

Kellman also had a second source of information: local AJC members who attended WCC meetings and then reported back to regional and national headquarters. Those AJC observers told Kellman how Southern WCCs had split into two groups: those that were racist and antisemitic, and those that accepted Jews as allies in the battle for White Supremacy. At the time of the Brown decision, Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the South’s population; 228,763 Jews lived in twelve Southern and Southwestern states. Several WCCs welcomed Jews as “honorary white Protestants” because white unity was seen as necessary to defeat the forces of integration. They also feared that blatant antisemitism would alienate potential supporters north of the Mason–Dixon line. But others excluded Jews, insisting that “there would be no Negro problem without the Jewish problem.”⁶

Jesse Stoner used the split among White Citizens Councils to mount a new political campaign. The WCCs, he insisted, proved far too timid and accommodating, especially to the region’s Jews. Nor did he trust the Klan to save Southern civilization from the powerful national forces driving integration. Despite the Klan’s militant claims to have replaced the Mason–Dixon line with “the Smith & Wesson line,” Stoner saw little success coming out of their efforts at intimidation. The former Tennessee Kleagle scoffed at Klansmen who cried out “Give me segregation or give me death” as hollow bravado that led nowhere. He felt the same way about them in the mid-1950s as he had in the mid-1940s: the Klan did not represent the interests of ordinary Southerners. Klansmen declared themselves saviors of the blue-collar South, but Stoner claimed to represent the far more numerous “dirty-collar” crowd. These were his people, and he would protect them from the evils emanating out of Washington, D.C.⁷

Stoner understood he could not achieve power on his own. To become something more than the head of a minor regional organization, he needed to forge alliances with multiple fascist and Nazi groups, or “nationalists” as they preferred to call themselves. In his fantasies, Stoner envisioned himself as the grand leader of such a new alliance, but he was savvy enough to swallow his ego and allow someone else to become the movement’s public face. He believed that his crippled leg and pronounced limp prevented him from fitting the image of a strong powerful white male leader. Fellow segregationists may have admired Stoner, but few liked him, including his own family. His antisemitism and white-hot anger were so pronounced that only the most dedicated racists wanted to work with him. Once he succeeded in forging a new organization, he would remain in the background serving as its senior legal advisor.

A life consumed by hate is often a very lonely life. A committed bachelor with few friends of either sex, Stoner sought help from his lifelong ally, Edward Reed Fields. Like his older friend, Fields had begun hating Jews and Blacks as a young boy and never stopped. As late as the 1980s, the committed racist with an unstinting admiration of Adolf Hitler insisted that “every Jew who holds a position of power or authority must be removed from that position. If this does not work, then we must establish [the] Final Solution!!!”⁸

[picture]

Jesse Stoner speaking at Klan rally (Getty Images)

Fields moved from Chicago to Atlanta as a young boy and attended a Catholic academy, where he recruited fellow students into a neo-Nazi organization called the Black Front. A youthful admirer of Nazism, Fields published his first tract, The Jew Comes to America, at the age of thirteen. A year later, the teenager joined the Columbians, where he met and became enamored of Stoner. Following the group’s breakup, Fields worked on the Free Emory Burke Committee and began corresponding with James Madole, a man they both admired.⁹

Like many Southerners too young to serve in World War II, Fields enlisted in the U.S. Naval Air Force in 1951 but was given a general discharge on the grounds of “unsuitability.” When he tried to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve a year later, the twenty-year-old described himself as a self-employed “Anti-Jewish Crusader” who would fight for his country but refused to serve “in the U.N. police or any Jew-controlled international force.” After discovering that Fields had opened a branch of the Christian Anti-Jewish Party at the Chamblee, Georgia, naval base and was recruiting fellow soldiers, military authorities canceled his enlistment.¹⁰

A subsequent medical report concluded that Fields had an “Abnormal Psychiatric—Paranoid personality—is not qualified for induction.” The examining physician described how Fields insisted “Jews caused him to be expelled from both college and the Navy. He appears calm, unperturbed, and somewhat arrogant during the interview . . . He is seriously sick and his chances of eventually becoming frankly insane are excellent.” The doctor was so concerned that he contacted the FBI and asked them to commit Fields to an institution. The Bureau wrote back that they “knew of no such person at the moment.” They were simply too busy pursuing suspected Red agitators to pay close attention to White Supremacists.¹¹

Rejected from military service, Fields joined Stoner at Atlanta Law School in 1952 and helped found the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. But the law did not suit him. He dropped out in 1953 to attend the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, where he continued his activism. In February 1954, while many Americans were celebrating National Brotherhood Week, Fields organized “Anti-Jewish Week” in Davenport and nearby Rock Island and Moline, Illinois, and was subsequently arrested for putting up antisemitic signs in all three cities.¹²

Although they shared a similar worldview, Stoner and Fields could not have been more unlike in physical appearance or tastes for modern life. A curmudgeon who never recovered from polio—either physically or mentally—the stocky Stoner stood five feet, six inches on good days and shied away from women, alcohol, and loud entertainment. When not attending meetings or rallies, he preferred his own company. After handling divorce and domestic cases following law school, he went to work as an insurance adjuster for State Farm, a job that gave him time for his political activities. A waitress at Brown’s Restaurant in Dublin, Georgia, noted how the quiet man who drove a 1955 cream-colored Ford always dined alone, drinking lots of Sanka coffee and demanding that no gravy touch his dinner plate.¹³

Stoner was as conservative in his dress as he was in his social life. He wore his customary white shirts and bow ties and kept his hair cut short. On the other hand, when surrounded by a crowd, he proved a flamboyant politician and charismatic stump speaker.

Edward Fields, a handsome blond who many thought looked like a movie star, enjoyed nightclub life and drinking, and was known to be a smooth talker and ardent womanizer. Far more inclined to business than Stoner was, the fastidious Fields ran the Christian Anti-Jewish Party’s daily operations and wrote its flyers and pamphlets.¹⁴

The Brown decision presented the two men with a chance to revive the Christian Anti-Jewish Party’s fortunes. That summer, Stoner gained national attention by leading a group of party members to Washington, D.C., where they picketed the White House for two days with signs proclaiming FREE AMERICA FROM THE JEWS, DEFY THE JEWS AND RESTORE SEGREGATION, and JEW-LED NAACP AND JEWISH B’NAI B’RITH’S ADL MADE SUPREME COURT BAN SEGREGATION. Stoner passed out party applications urging true Americans to “Send the Jew Devils back [to Hell],” and promising once again that “When the Jews are gone, we Americans will own rich America.” His newspaper, Thunderbolt, successor to the Columbian periodical of the same name, denounced the “Jewish-dominated and rabbi-instructed Supreme Court” for trying to bring about a “mongrelization of the white race” and urged Americans to protect the Aryan race from further assaults no matter what the cost.¹⁵

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Edward R. Fields in front of NSRP banner (Getty Images)

The former Klan firebrand blamed Jews for leading and funding much of the Civil Rights movement. He pointed out how Jack Greenberg served as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s chief counsel, Herbert Hill as its head of labor relations, and Joel Springarn as its second president from 1930 until his death in 1939.16

Stoner and Fields had tried launching a party on their own and failed. Learning from past mistakes, they now tried to convince rival nationalists to create a single party with a set of core principles around which they could all unite. The initial problem they faced was the presence of too many White Supremacists who believed they were the right choice to lead such a coalition—what could be called the “too many führers problem.” Getting diverse groups to work together proved a multi-year task. New and old right-wing organizations met throughout 1954, 1955, and 1956 with the aim of designing a common course of action. Yet, before they could launch a truly national movement, they first needed to build a united regional presence.¹⁷

Ironically, it was President Dwight Eisenhower who helped unite the right. After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, he unleashed a fury throughout the South not seen since the days of Reconstruction. When nine Black students tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, that fall, they were greeted by a full-scale riot initiated by a mob of angry segregationists who were protected by the Arkansas National Guard.

Determined to uphold the Supreme Court’s decision, Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent in 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to restore order and help Black students enter the high school in peace. As far as Southerners were concerned, their state sovereignty was once again being violated by invading “Yankee” troops. Southern politicians from both parties had failed to protect their constituents. Something drastic had to be done.

On November 10, 1957, with the recently graduated Dr. Fields now married and living in Louisville, he and Stoner convened a virtual who’s who of fascists in Knoxville, where they formed the United White Party and pledged to “vote the [race] traitors out of office.” The party’s founding members were men with deep experience in fascist movements: Emory Burke, former NRP security chief Matt Koehl, retired automobile salesman Ned Dupes, and John Kasper, the Washington, D.C., bookstore owner who had served a year in federal prison for his anti-integration activities.¹⁸

James Madole was the only major fascist Stoner and Fields could not convince to attend. They wanted Madole both because of his outspoken antisemitism and because they wanted to use his National Renaissance Bulletin to publicize their activities among domestic and international groups. The New York Nazi had received similar requests to unite with Ku Klux Klan groups anxious to obtain access to the NR Bulletin. He declined both invitations, explaining to Fields and the Klan that he would gladly cooperate with both but would not allow them to use his group or its periodical to serve their interests. Anxious for Madole’s support, Fields sent a representative to New York to invite him to speak at a planned second gathering.¹⁹

Also present at the November meeting was a new participant in right-wing politics—and an ardent Hitler admirer—George Lincoln Rockwell. The recent convert to the cause arrived in Knoxville a day before the gathering to meet with Emory Burke, who was then working as an architect in Decatur, Georgia. Rockwell pitched his “Lincoln Plan,” one that would pay every Black family in the United States $10,000 ($113,960 in 2024 dollars) to emigrate to Africa. Burke loved the idea but advised Rockwell to eliminate all Nazi rhetoric from his presentation. Southerners, he told his new friend, made no distinction between National Socialism and Communism. Heeding Burke’s advice, Rockwell addressed the delegates without referencing Hitler. Afterward, United White Party cofounder Wallace Allen offered the impressive political neophyte a job selling advertising and his ideology in Atlanta.²⁰

George Kellman and the AJC knew all about the inner workings and cleavages that arose during these meetings because one of his new undercover operatives, “Reporter B,” a journalist for a far-right periodical, attended the 1957 convention. Shoenfeld’s agent was also a regular visitor to Madole’s weekly meetings, where he gained further information from Southern White Supremacist organizations that sent representatives to New York to recruit new members and raise funds for their organizations. Agent B gave his reports from the Knoxville meetings to Shoenfeld.²¹

The United White Party was the first step toward a larger, more powerful coalition. In early 1958, ADL leader Arnold Forster calculated there were forty antisemitic groups in the South, with twenty-five of them engaged in direct action beyond distributing propaganda. Driven by ego and ideology, Stoner and Fields did not want to be one among many; they wanted to head the most important White Supremacist group in the United States. To that end, they urged United White Party delegates to meet again in 1958 to devise a political agenda that could mobilize voters north and south of the Mason–Dixon line.²²

Prior to that gathering, Jesse Stoner attempted to forge the most unusual alliance of his long career. Throughout his life, the former Klan leader maintained a pathological hatred of Jews and Blacks. The latter, he insisted, were the ignorant unthinking puppets of the former. But there was one exception. In an unusual June 1957 letter to the Chicago Defender, the country’s most prominent Black periodical, Stoner praised deceased segregationist Marcus Garvey as the “Black Moses” and “greatest Negro in American history.” While, in Stoner’s view, the Nation of Islam’s “evil genius” Elijah Muhammad desired the destruction of the white race, Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded in 1914) wanted a peaceful separation of the races and called upon American Blacks to return voluntarily to their ancestral African homeland.²³

Seeing Garveyites as potential allies, Stoner wrote a warm letter to Chicago Garveyite leader S. A. Davis, praising the group’s founder as “a true prophet” who wanted to avoid the “rivers of blood” that would flow if Black Muslims were in charge. Stoner promised that under his party’s leadership, the United States would pay to transport Blacks to Africa “and support them in first-class condition until they have full opportunity to get well established in their native land.” Once there, Black émigrés would “enjoy a rich country of their own in freedom and self-respect and the respect of the whole world.”²⁴

No formal alliance was ever forged; however, Stoner’s hatred of Elijah Muhammad led him to write to New York City police commissioner Stephen Kennedy in August 1959 offering to help suppress the Black Muslim movement. “I think 5,000 Klansmen could clean up Harlem for you if you would give them police badges and New York police uniforms to wear instead of their Klan uniforms.” Stoner asked the commissioner to supply his men with “machine guns, riot guns, tear gas and big clubs. They will especially want some big sticks with iron inside the wood so they can crack hard nigger skulls.” The police commissioner declined the offer.²⁵

On August 30–31, 1958, after an initial planning meeting in February dubbed the “Ultimatum Conference of Loyal Americans,” many of the same players who had organized the United White Party returned to Louisville’s Liberty Hall to launch an ambitious new venture. Attended by 100 delegates from eighteen states, the conference succeeded in merging the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, the United White Party, the National White Americans Party, the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Realpolitical Institute, the National Citizens Protective Association, and the remnants of the White Circle League into what immediately became the preeminent White Supremacist political party in the United States.²⁶ They named it the National States Rights Party (NSRP).

Jesse B. Stoner and his longtime political partner Edward Fields played a critical role, perhaps their most important ever, in creating the NSRP. But the Stoner of the post-Brown era was different from the Stoner of the immediate postwar years. The former Klan firebrand had continued evolving as a political leader, learning from past mistakes and fixing them whenever possible. The Columbians and his two anti-Jewish parties had failed in part because their demands had been too radical. His call for the immediate execution of all American Jews had proved too much, even for the Ku Klux Klan. Stoner had had to change his policies if he was to have any serious political success. The evolution of his thinking was clear when he suggested what to call the new party. “The name of the National States Rights Party will sound so mild,” he insisted, “that a man belonging to it will not worry about [losing] his job.”²⁷

The NSRP was a milder version of the Columbians and the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. To broaden its national appeal, the new party stopped calling for the immediate mass execution of the nation’s Jews. Once in power, their party would begin the peaceful deportation of all “mongrel” races. Blacks and Jews would be sent to Africa, with the latter confined to Madagascar. But before they left, Jews’ “ill-gotten wealth” would be confiscated by the government and used “for the benefit of the American people.” Despite their effort to sound more reasonable in their policies toward minorities, the NSRP warned that anyone who refused to leave the country would “be purified” by government authorities. In short, the NSRP offered Jews and Blacks a choice: leave the country peacefully or die.²⁸

To lure voters unhappy with Democrats and Republicans, the NSRP needed to offer citizens a vision that extended beyond hating Jews and Blacks. They needed a vision that promised to save white America from its current problems. Stoner introduced a theme in 1958 that would be embraced by far-right groups and militias from the 1980s to the present: the American government could no longer be trusted. Democrats and Republicans were controlled by Jews and international forces (like the United Nations) that undermined American sovereignty and citizens’ rights. Jews and their Washington vassals were not merely trying to end segregation; they were actively promoting integration, a policy that would lead to the destruction of the white race. Only the NSRP, he argued, could save the nation from multiple domestic and international threats. They would do so not as racists and antisemites, but as loyal Americans following the teachings of Christ and saving the nation from the Jewish–Communist threat.

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Join NSRP Today flyer (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Convention delegates tempered the most extreme demands of the Columbians and Christian Anti-Jewish Party, but not their staunch commitment to White Supremacy or Christian Identity. “Anti-Jewism,” the NSRP constitution proclaimed, “is a leading Christian virtue and an essential patriotic virtue.” To reinforce its claim to be guided by Christ, party delegates welcomed into their ranks the nation’s best known Christian Identity minister, Wesley Swift. The forty-five-year-old former Klan rifle instructor and disciple of Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith had launched his Los Angeles–based Church of Jesus Christ–Christian in 1946. Like Jesse Stoner, Swift insisted white Western Europeans, not Jews, were the true “Lost Tribes of Israel.” The loathsome Jewish race had emerged, in his thinking, as a result of Eve copulating with Satan (in serpent form) and giving birth to Cain, the world’s first murderer.²⁹

Swift’s Christian Identity preaching became so popular that he created a chain of congregations across the country, many of which eventually morphed into the Aryan Nations. Not only did Swift attend the NSRP’s initial convention, but he also agreed to serve as its West Coast representative. Joining Swift at the convention was Gordon Winrod, a rising star in the Christian Identity movement and son of Gerald Winrod, the infamous far-right Kansas evangelist and Hitler supporter known as the Jayhawk Nazi. To curry support among far-right evangelicals, the NSRP named Winrod its first party chaplain.³⁰

Stoner persuaded delegates to place Christian Identity at the core of its ideology and appeal. “We of the National States Rights Party,” their constitution proclaimed, “believe in the Christian heritage of our people, the White Race and the Nation which the Whiteman created out of the wilderness of this continent.” The country’s “Jew-devils have no place in a White Christian nation.” Unlike the two mainstream parties, the NSRP would “not allow the blood of our people to be polluted with that of black, yellow, or mongrel peoples.” They pledged to “dedicate ourselves to the task of saving America and the White Race and the preservation of the pure blood of our forefathers, so that all future generations which come after us will be born as White children with a creative intelligence that will strengthen our civilized influence over the world for the good of all mankind.”³¹

The interconnection of religion, antisemitism, and racism was displayed on a large banner spread across the main stage that read OUR LEADER JESUS CHRIST. Delegates accused Jews of being the driving force behind the Brown decision and attacked President Eisenhower and the Supreme Court for being in thrall to “international Jewry.” Revolutions, wars, internationalism, economic chaos, unemployment, and racial mongrelization were all designed by the Jews to promote their communistic conspiracy. More than racial security was at stake. With spies like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, Jews threatened the very existence of the United States.³²

During the two-day convention, party leaders hammered out a thirty-six-point platform that promised to end Jewish influence and give the nation’s white working class a representative voice in national politics. Like the Columbians and Stoner’s early parties, the NSRP appealed to the poorest white underclasses: youths, rural residents, and small-town communities dissatisfied with the failure of both parties to stop integration and improve their economic condition. Journalist Drew Pearson described the NSRP’s main constituents as “men in shirtsleeves and overalls” and “women in calico.” He was struck by the youthful composition of the party’s leadership, noting that at least 30 percent of its primary activists were twenty-five-years-old or younger.³³

Claiming to be “the last hope of the Whiteman to save our White Christian Civilization,” the party platform attempted to institutionalize racism and antisemitism by demanding the complete separation of the races. Those joining the NSRP had to pledge, “I am against Jewish communism, monopoly, race-mixing and internationalism.” NSRP politicians promised that once they were in national office they would restrict future immigration to whites only and stop all aid to Israel so that the United States could begin the process of “rebuilding of Arab-American friendship.”³⁴

Before leaving Louisville, NSRP delegates selected a slate of men and women to lead the party into the second half of the twentieth century. Hoping to appeal to citizens in border states, they chose two Indiana residents, Arthur Cole and Edna Cowan, as their first national chair and vice-chair. They could not lure James Madole into the fold, but they appointed his former Elite Guard leader Matt Koehl as the party’s first national organizer and security officer. Delegates named Emory Burke as special “advisor” and honored him with membership card No. 1. J. B. Stoner was selected as the party’s general counsel and Edward Fields as editor of the NSRP’s official newspaper, the Thunderbolt. Offering “the White Man’s Viewpoint” on current events, the Thunderbolt served as a voice for all those frustrated with the failure of the nation’s current political leadership. By the end of the year, it expanded from eight to twelve pages and boasted a circulation of over 100,000 in all fifty states and many foreign countries—which gave it the largest circulation of any American far-right publication.³⁵

Stoner and his minions hoped to reach a broad national audience, but the visual symbols they used were distinctly Southern and fascist in tone. Delegates adopted a version of the Columbian flag as their party’s symbol: a Confederate flag with a red thunderbolt (modeled after the insignia of the Hitler Youth) inside a large circle superimposed in the center. The most militant NSRP members wore uniforms like those of the defunct Columbians: black trousers, a white shirt with a black tie, a Sam Browne belt, and an armband bearing the party emblem.

The NSRP became the first major fascist party to run candidates for state and national office since Pearl Harbor. Looking ahead to the 1960 elections, convention delegates selected well-known White Supremacist retired rear admiral John G. Crommelin Jr. as their presidential candidate, and longtime fascist Millard Grubbs, head of Kentucky’s White Citizens Council, as the state’s 1959 gubernatorial candidate. The party subsequently changed its mind and chose Arkansas’s segregationist governor Orval Faubus as its presidential choice and John G. Crommelin as their vice-presidential nominee.

Despite their efforts to present their ideas in more palatable form, the NSRP was founded upon the pillars of racism, antisemitism, and an end to democracy. Once in power, all laws that were contrary to their party platform would be “declared unconstitutional by the courts or repealed.” They promised to replace all state and federal judges with jurists who would interpret the Constitution in accordance with the “original intent” of the NSRP’s “platform and program.”³⁶

More than any of its predecessors, the NSRP convention succeeded in bringing together delegates from all parts of the country—South, Northeast, Midwest, and West. This diverse alliance of nationalist groups was precisely what Jewish leaders had been worrying about since the end of World War II. The ADL, AJC, and ANL insisted they could deal with any single hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan. Their greatest fear, however, was that large numbers of White Supremacists would put aside minor differences and unite in a powerful coalition, one precisely like the National States Rights Party. Arnold Forster worried that NSRP leaders represented a “higher caliber than Klan elements and the membership more articulate.” Their fears grew stronger as the nascent party “watered down” its fascist roots, as one founder noted, “to allow the organization to become a truly mass movement.” By making their party sound more reasonable, delegates made it more dangerous.³⁷

J. B. Stoner could not have agreed more wholeheartedly. He and his allies wanted to forge a mass movement that extended well beyond the South. The question was how to achieve it. The NSRP counsel understood that party platforms and constitutions were simply words on paper. Action was needed if the NSRP was to succeed. He saw how violence had helped the Columbians and the National Renaissance Party attract publicity and new members. Violence could do the same for them. Stoner and his inner circle had a two-part strategy: bombs and ballots. They would begin by initiating a campaign of terror throughout the South and then proclaim the NSRP as the only party that could stop it.

By putting his ego to the side and working with the broad NSRP coalition, Stoner showed his ability to evolve as a political leader. But his sheer hatred for Jews and Blacks blinded him to the fact that to succeed as a national party, the NSRP had to offer voters an economic and political agenda that went beyond just ethnic cleansing.

While many Americans looked upon the party’s subsequent streak of deadly violence with horror, Stoner’s supporters saw it as a sign of hope. One way or another, they would restore white Christians to their true place of dominance. They would frighten the enemy into submission. Once in high office, they would pass laws to create a pure white America free of Blacks and Jews, and legally murder any man, woman, or child who refused to leave. They now called upon millions of Americans to join their struggle for “Christ, Race, Nation!”³⁸

11.

Bombs, Synagogues, Churches, and the Age of Terror

Jesse B. Stoner’s promised war against Jews and Blacks came sooner than anyone expected. At 3:30 A.M. on October 12, 1958, forty-two days after the National States Rights Party convention ended, the sights, sounds, and smells of Atlanta were altered by the explosion of a powerful bomb that tore apart the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, the city’s most important synagogue. Twenty minutes later, a man calling himself General Gordon of the Confederate Underground telephoned the offices of the United Press International claiming responsibility for the terrorist act. “We have just blown up the temple. This is the last empty building I’ll blow up in Atlanta.” No one was killed in the early morning explosion, but it blew out a large part of the temple, causing $200,000 ($2.2 million in 2024 dollars) in damages and untold fear among the city’s Jewish community.¹

Gordon and the Confederate Underground boasted of committing the crime, but the real perpetrators were Jesse B. Stoner and a cadre of supporters, many of whom had worked with him in the Columbians or the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. Emory Burke’s group may have died out, but not its members’ commitment to maintaining White Supremacy at any cost. Stoner considered himself a Christian, but it is doubtful he ever went to churches except to bomb them.

World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945, soon after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nearly a decade later, American bombing would resume. Only now, for the first time since the Civil War, Americans would bomb fellow Americans.

The bombing of the Atlanta synagogue was part of a post-Brown campaign of terror against synagogues and Black churches that began in earnest on October 5, 1955, with the bombing of the St. James AME Church in Lake City, South Carolina. The wave of terror continued into the early 1960s as dozens of churches and synagogues were violently attacked. So many bombs were detonated in Birmingham that it soon became known as “Bombingham.”

A new and very uncivil war had begun in earnest. The NSRP set out to end nearly 200 years of democracy in favor of a White Supremacist republic that would deport all people of color. Stoner and his allies unleashed a campaign of terror that the Aryan Nations, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers of the twenty-first century would admire and duplicate.

During the mid-1950s, bombs were set off at churches and synagogues in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina on an almost biweekly basis. Between May 1954 and October 1958, segregationists bombed at least eighty Black and Jewish homes, schools, and places of worship in the South. On January 30, 1956, Klansmen bombed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s home; two years later they solicited Stoner to kill King in Birmingham. Even famed trumpet player Louis Armstrong fell victim to Southern violence when segregationists planted a bomb in Knoxville’s civic auditorium before his performance. He survived and continued his tour.²

The “invasion” of Little Rock by federal troops—or “armed Cossacks,” as James Madole called them—in September 1957 sparked a new wave of outrage and violence. Birmingham’s Black community was rocked on June 29, 1958, when night watchman Will Hall discovered a paint can filled with fifteen to twenty sticks of unexploded dynamite near the wall of the Bethel Baptist Church. Hall carried the can into the street where it exploded, blowing a two-foot hole in the street and damaging nearby homes. Police suspected Jesse Stoner of masterminding the bombing, but they lacked evidence to indict him. Black ministers who openly supported integration either were severely beaten or had their homes bombed.³

Violent attacks on Jewish synagogues and institutions were equally pronounced. Nationalists blamed “the Jew—not the Negro or the Supreme Court” for being the mastermind behind Southern tensions. Blacks, they argued, were not intelligent enough to run organizations such as the NAACP and pointed out that 90 percent of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish. A message needed to be sent. On November 11, 1957, the caretaker of Temple Beth-El in Charlotte, North Carolina, found a package containing six sticks of dynamite leaning against the rear wall of the temple. The fuse had been lit but apparently burned itself out. It was one thing for the Supreme Court to issue an edict, but quite another to enforce it.⁴

Fortunately, not all those engaged in the bombing campaign were skilled at their jobs. In the predawn hours of February 9, 1958, a valise containing thirty sticks of dynamite was found at the entrance of Temple Emmanuel in Gastonia, North Carolina. A faulty fuse had been lit, but failed to go off, thus saving the temple from destruction. Five weeks later, at 2:30 A.M., an explosion caused by a dozen sticks of dynamite ripped apart the religious school of Miami’s Temple Beth-El, smashing windows, bringing the reception hall’s ceiling crashing down, hurling iron railing 150 yards from the temple, and waking hundreds of nearby residents. That evening, at 8:30 P.M., another bomb exploded at Nashville’s Jewish Community Center, also causing extensive damage.⁵

Attacks on Jewish and Black men, women, and children were unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving. On April 28, Southern Jews and Blacks suffered through three more acts of domestic terrorism. A morning bombing of a Jewish community center in Jacksonville, Florida, was followed within the hour by the bombing of a Black school in the same city. Later that day, a Black janitor discovered a rain-soaked blue valise left in the window well of Birmingham’s Temple Beth-El that contained a high-powered nitroglycerin bomb (fueled by fifty-four sticks of dynamite). The damp fuse had failed to ignite. Had it detonated, it would have blown up the entire synagogue and a good deal of the surrounding neighborhood.⁶

Several of these incidents were followed by phone calls claiming credit for the bombings and warning of more destruction to come. An hour after Nashville’s Jewish Community Center was damaged, Rabbi William Silverman received a phone call from the Confederate Underground. “We have just dynamited the Jewish community center. Next will be the temple and next will be any other nigger-loving place or nigger-loving person in Nashville.” In Jacksonville, the Confederate Underground promised the bombings would “continue until segregation is restored everywhere in the South.”⁷

Bombs did not have to blow up buildings to terrorize Blacks and Jews. The constant threat of daily violence was enough to diminish the quality of their lives. Countless numbers of men, women, and children now spent every day worrying about survival, not integration.

Black leaders responded to the bombings by initiating marches, boycotts, and court filings and fighting back through organizations such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The success of the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted from December 1955 to December 1956, convinced hundreds of thousands of Blacks to join King’s movement. They proved that it was possible to stand up to fear. But it often came at the cost of beatings and jail time.⁸

Leaders of the AJC, ADL, and ANL were equally concerned by the rise of the National States Rights Party. But these New York–based groups faced a difficult situation. It was one thing to run undercover operations in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area and even in distant cities such as Atlanta. But given geographical distance and limited budgets, it was nearly impossible to spy on an entire region of the United States. Whether the ADL, AJC, and ANL could contain, let alone stop, the ongoing violence was uncertain. But they and their agents would try. Simply standing by and hoping for the best was not an option. Neither group trusted the FBI nor local authorities to protect them from harm. They would have to protect themselves.

The ADL maintained the most extensive surveillance of racist and antisemitic groups throughout the nation. Arnold Forster, head of their Fact-Finding Division, relied on a network of regional offices—especially in Atlanta, Miami, Biloxi, and New Orleans—to report on the activities of White Citizens Councils, the National States Rights Party, and Klan units in their region. The most daring of those regional offices asked ADL members to join White Citizens Councils to observe their plans firsthand. Forster then shared their reports with the FBI and local officials. That information often prevented further incidents of death and destruction. After receiving a tip about a forthcoming bombing, Bea Botnick, executive director of the ADL’s Mississippi office, alerted the state police, who were then “prepared when the people went to the place of the planned bomb.” Botnick’s information led to “a number of people [being] put in prison.”⁹

As Botnick implied, the ADL monitored threats to Blacks as well as Jews. “We would go to places where there had been violent anti-black acts and take positions, and go and investigate,” explained Miami-based Burnett Roth. “We would be the ones intervening with the police because of Klan activities directed not at Jews but at blacks. We intervened in any anti-black activities.” Whenever they uncovered Klan plans for “destruction or bombings or other threats, we would be the ones to act.” A threat to one minority, ADL leaders insisted, was a threat to all minorities. As ADL head Benjamin Epstein told his son David, they were “the Anti-Defamation League not the Antisemitic League.”¹⁰

Spying in the South, however, was ultimately limited by deep divisions between Southern and Northern Jews. Despite the acceleration of violence in the mid-1950s, many Southern Jews did not want any help from the ADL. The Jewish organization had earned the enmity of segregationists by filing an amicus curia brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Local Jews feared that further support for integration would place their businesses, their homes, and their lives in jeopardy. “There’ll be blood in the streets of Birmingham and Mobile,” warned one group of ADL Southerners. Jews were tolerated in many communities and even accepted in some. But if they openly embraced integration, they faced the wrath of their right-wing Christian neighbors. “Every time one of you makes a speech,” an ADL member from Waycross, Georgia, wrote to the New York offices, “I’m afraid my husband’s store will be burned up.” Others argued that Northern Jews “had placed southern Jews in this difficult and potentially dangerous position,” and blamed bombings on the ADL’s decision to take a “position in favor of desegregation.”¹¹

Following the publication of a letter in the Richmond News Leader accusing Jews of leading the integration campaign, ADL representative Lester Waldman left New York to meet with local Jewish leaders. They told him they did not want the national offices intervening in local affairs; they wanted to deal with integration as they saw fit. When Waldman visited Little Rock, he was warned, “the Jewish community in Little Rock doesn’t like you being here and we think you ought to leave.” He did. Waldman reported a similar response in Atlanta. Following the temple bombing, local leaders established a Jewish community council that was “unfriendly to the ADL which it regarded as a national organization coming in and setting up rules for local communities. These local community representatives felt this was an invasion of their right to determine how the communities should respond.”¹²

Between May and June 1958, ADL representatives visited 143 Southern communities from Virginia to East Texas trying to forge a compromise over integration. Meeting with the ADL’s national board in New York, Southern Jews warned, “If you support the blacks, you will see blood flowing in the streets of Mobile and southern towns.” Despite Southern concerns, national leaders refused to retreat. If Southern communities let dynamiters go unpunished for attacks on Black homes and institutions, they argued, then “anti-Semites will be encouraged to try the same tactics against Jews.” With so much local opposition, the ADL had to rely on information gathered by its extensive network of regional directors rather than embedded spies.¹³

James Sheldon did not share the ADL’s concerns about Southern undercover operations. Sheldon wanted to repeat the Anti-Nazi League’s earlier success with the Columbians and National Renaissance Party by placing agents provocateurs inside the NSRP. But he lacked the funds and the ADL’s expansive network of regional offices to do so. He did, however, receive occasional reports about Southern developments from Stetson Kennedy and Columbian-turned-ANL agent Lanier Waller.¹⁴

Sheldon also obtained valuable information about Southern terrorists from undercover operatives inside the National Renaissance Party. Stoner and Fields hoped to expand the NSRP’s reach beyond the Deep South by hiring Brooklyn-born Navy veteran William “Wild Bill” Hoff Jr. to organize local chapters in New York and Northeastern states. Hoff, who grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood and was part African American (a secret kept until after his death), allied himself with Madole and became a regular attendee at NRP meetings. Sheldon’s spies sent him reports of what Hoff had to say about NSRP plans.¹⁵

The American Jewish Committee also made a determined effort to monitor nationalists following the Brown decision. George Kellman, who replaced George Mintzer as director of the Investigation and Fact-Finding Committee in 1951, was determined not to let fear or money stop his organization from protecting Jews and Blacks. Born in New York City in December 1906, Abraham Joseph Kellman changed his first name to the less Jewish-sounding George as a ten-year-old after being repeatedly beaten by his Irish neighbors. Graduating DeWitt Clinton High School at sixteen, he went to New York University for a year, left to clerk at a law firm, and then obtained a law degree from St. John’s University. Enlisting in the Army in March 1943, he served with a Military Police unit in charge of transporting prisoners of war. He remained in the service until illness led to his discharge in January 1944. Soon afterward, Mintzer persuaded him to work for the AJC, where he remained until his retirement in the early 1970s.¹⁶

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George Kellman (Courtesy Barnet Kellman)

Following the Brown decision, Kellman requested increasingly larger budgets that would allow him to “to carry on confidential field investigations of potentially or actually troublesome situations in local communities,” especially in the South and Midwest. In 1955, his entire undercover budget was $20,440, of which $9,100 ($107,810 in 2024 dollars) was paid to Shoenfeld and $6,760 and $4,680 to his two operatives. Kellman asked for an another $15,000 to send “reporters” into areas they were not currently monitoring, and another $10,000 for special research to discover “the sources of finance of anti-Semitic propaganda.” The AJC gave him an additional $10,000 for 1956 and 1957, but it was not enough to place full-time agents inside the White Citizens Councils, Ku Klux Klan, or NSRP. Instead, he relied on occasional reports from Abe Shoenfeld’s “Reporter A” and “Reporter B,” both of whom worked “among the leadership of the old-line anti-Semitic movement” and provided Kellman with “a window on the entire anti-Semitic organizational network in this country.” Occasionally they traveled to national gatherings, but most of what they learned came from the loose-lipped representatives who attended Madole’s weekly meetings.¹⁷

Kellman did not have sufficient staff or budget “to build a program on Southern White Councils.” Instead, he sent out questionnaires to AJC members in eighty Southern cities and relied on their observations and reports. Kellman then pooled information he received and, when appropriate, sent it to local police and the FBI.¹⁸

Running an undercover operation in which the lives of operatives were at stake took its toll on spymasters as well as spies. Like the Biblical Job, George Kellman believed he was on a godly mission that he would have preferred not to undertake. “This work did not make Dad happy,” his son Barnet recollected. “He was not a zealot. My father saw it as necessary work, but always nasty. This was Jewish fate that he was handling.” Having experienced antisemitic violence growing up and in the Army, he knew it would not fade away on its own. “By fighting for Negro rights,” he explained, the AJC “would achieve their own goals” of protecting Jews and Blacks. Successful attacks on the latter, he knew, would ultimately lead to attacks on the former. He wanted the AJC to protect both.¹⁹

Like his counterparts at the ADL and ANL, Kellman was especially concerned with the activities of Jesse Stoner and the National States Rights Party, a “violently-oriented group that is half-Nazi and half-Klan.” By the late 1950s, Kellman pushed his colleagues to adopt a more aggressive approach to containing the seemingly relentless violence. As Shoenfeld warned him, “It is as easy to get hold of sticks of dynamite in the hinterland farm areas as it is to buy a subway ride in New York.”²⁰

Despite their limited abilities to spy in the South, all three organizations succeeded in sowing discord among nationalists by raising fears that their organizations had been penetrated by Jewish spies and that many of their leaders were double agents working for the Jews. Even Edward Fields came under suspicion from his seemingly close friend James Madole. As Abe Shoenfeld’s “Reporter B” noted, Madole was convinced “Edward Fields is an ‘agent,’ a provocateur.” Sheldon’s agents also succeeded in turning Nazi against Nazi, fascist against fascist. They persuaded far-right pamphleteer Joseph Kamp that Madole’s party was an ADL front. Paranoia even extended to Mississippi Klansmen, whose periodical White Sentinel branded Madole and George Lincoln Rockwell “as agents of the ADL.” Likewise, Miami Klan leaders ordered members to shun Jesse Stoner, accusing him of being a secret ADL agent.²¹

Men like Stoner, Fields, Burke, and Rockwell knew they were being spied upon. They just did not know who the spies were. Rockwell was convinced the ADL was causing most of their problems and proposed delivering a clear warning: he and his men would “cut up one of the ADL people and send his body in a box up to the ADL offices [in New York].”²²

As killings, bombings, and assaults became increasingly commonplace, ADL and AJC leaders agreed to create a special “coordinating committee” to stem the bombings. They asked ADL operative and former FBI agent Milton Ellerin to travel south and identify reliable men who could assist local law enforcement agencies in tracking down terrorists. The forty-three-year-old New Jersey–born Jew had spent much of World War II working for the FBI monitoring Nazi and fascist groups in the Northeast and Midwest. In March 1958, he traveled to Nashville and found five men he trusted to assist the ADL–AJC in its bombing investigations: former Tennessee Governor Frank Clement, two lawyers, an insurance man, and Knoxville police captain and former FBI agent Lowry Reams. The captain, in turn, provided the names of twenty-five men in his state who would offer reliable information.²³

Ellerin’s work could not have happened at a more auspicious time. On May 3, 1958, following months of bombings, police representatives from twenty-one Southern states met in Jacksonville to create a joint investigative agency called the Southern Conference on Bombings (SCB). When J. Edgar Hoover refused to send agents to assist, insisting this was a state and not a federal matter, Ellerin furnished conference leaders with a list of the South’s most notorious racists and antisemites, men who either participated in the bombing or knew who did. That list included the name of Birmingham’s infamous commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, a man who had repeatedly accused Blacks of bombing their own homes and churches. Connor’s name was soon removed, citing a “clerical error.” The SCB offered $55,700 in rewards for information leading to the conviction of the bombers. No one ever claimed the reward.²⁴

Furious at being named a bombing suspect, Connor returned home from Jacksonville determined to pin the blame for the violent assaults on the South’s most infamous Jew-hater, Jesse B. Stoner. On May 11, Connor met with longtime Klan leader William Hugh Morris, who claimed to know who was responsible for many of the bombings since 1956. If Stoner “didn’t do it,” he told the public safety commissioner, “he is the kingpin who had it done … This man will do anything against the Jews and the Negroes, and especially against the Jews. He hates the Jews.” Stoner, the Klan informant warned, was as cautious as he was clever. He “has an alibi for every bombing that he has ever had anything to do with.”²⁵

Connor set up a sting operation the following month. Klansman Morris contacted Stoner, who was “desperate for money,” and promised to pay him to help an angry (fictitious) group of steelworkers arrange a series of bombings. A week later, on June 21, Stoner drove his 1956 Studebaker to Birmingham and met with two of Connor’s undercover men, police Captain G. L. Pattie and Sergeant Tom Cook, who told him their group had been behind the failed bombing of Beth-El Synagogue. They needed someone experienced in handling dynamite to blow up the church of civil rights activist Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Stoner “agreed that he could have the church completely destroyed for $2,000.” During their conversation, Stoner “was careful to avoid any incriminating admission about any past acts.” However, he did promise that if any bomb failed to explode, “we would not be charged for it, but another would be set off.”²⁶

The conversation in Morris’s car was being secretly recorded by Connor and FBI special agent in charge—and future Bureau director—Clarence Kelley. But there would be no arrest: the two men later claimed that the tape deck had “malfunctioned.” The only hard evidence they had was Pattie’s testimony.²⁷

The sting operation backfired. Like many other law-enforcement officers, Connor had greatly underestimated Stoner. On June 28, a detective stationed at Birmingham’s Greyhound Bus Station spotted Stoner arriving with Christian Anti-Jewish Party loyalist Robert Bowling. Early the next morning, a cache of dynamite was discovered—and safely detonated—near the wall of Reverend Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church. An embarrassed Connor immediately went to Washington to ask the FBI for help. He had unwittingly arranged for the bombing and now feared possible repercussions. Connor told the Bureau how shortly after the explosion, his informant received a long-distance call from Stoner demanding to be paid his $2,000. Connor needed the FBI’s help in capturing him “because he or his crowd do not live in the state of Alabama.” Stoner “must be tailed every hour until he is caught,” he pleaded, “or he and his crowd are going to do a lot of damage in the Southeast.”²⁸

Angry Bureau leaders in Washington, D.C., responded to the botched operation by ordering Birmingham agents “to hold contacts with Connor to a minimum in view of his unsavory background.”²⁹

Jesse Stoner thought he could get away with the bombings and for good reason. White men had been killing Black men for nearly a century with little intervention by local authorities. A 1968 U.S. Civil Rights Commission counted 2,595 lynchings of Blacks in Southern states between 1882 and 1959. Not one had resulted in a white man’s conviction. When two Mississippi men were put on trial for murdering fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was tortured and lynched in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman, the jury found them not guilty. A year later, no longer fearing double jeopardy, the men confessed to the murder.³⁰

Passage of the Civil Rights Act in September 1957 did little to stem the ceaseless violence. Whatever politicians in Washington, D.C., may have said or thought, Southerners like Stoner and his NSRP compatriots considered the South a nation unto itself. They, not Northern politicians, would decide the future of their region. No court, not even the Supreme Court, was powerful enough to defeat men and women determined to resist integration at all costs. In the twelve months between October 1957 and October 1958, Southerners experienced the trauma of forty-seven bombings or attempted bombings.³¹

Jesse B. Stoner succeeded in persuading large numbers of men and women to join his campaign of terror. But it came at the cost of leading a very lonely existence. Alienated from his relatives, living in single rented rooms for most of his life and shying away from romantic relationships, he drew comfort from the certainty of his cause: Integration was wrong! Mixing with Jews was wrong! He and God knew he was right and everyone else be damned! But his was still a lonely and often bitter life filled with constant rage toward many of his fellow citizens. Stoner’s self-imposed isolation intensified his commitment to violence.

The post-Brown bombing campaign achieved what Stoner had hoped: it brought widespread publicity and new supporters to the cause. But to make significant inroads in supplanting Democratic and Republican hold on Southern voters, even more violence was needed. On October 12, 1958, less than two months after the first NSRP convention, Stoner and his minions launched their most audacious assault against Southern Jews. Early that morning, while most of Atlanta’s residents were asleep, fifty sticks of dynamite exploded at the South’s preeminent liberal synagogue, Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple on elegant Peachtree Street. The explosion blew out of front of the temple and woke up people several blocks away. It was the most successful temple bombing in terms of sheer destruction.

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Mayor William Hartsfield and Rabbi Jacob Rothschild examine temple damage (Georgia State University Archives)

The Temple explosion was more than just another bomb; it was a message sent by the NSRP. Atlanta, which called itself the City Too Busy to Hate, had witnessed considerable prejudice and deadly violence in its past. It was a Southern battleground between past and present, between courageous white progressives and hate-driven men like Stoner and Burke. In 1915, its citizens had lynched Jewish factory owner Leo Frank for a rape and murder he did not commit. Thirty-one years later, it emerged as the center of the nation’s first postwar neo-Nazi group, the Columbians. Since then, its reform temple had established itself as one of the most prominent liberal congregations in the South.

In few places was the Black–Jewish alliance more apparent than in Atlanta. Its rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, earned the enmity of Southern racists for his outspoken endorsement of the Civil Rights movement and repeated calls for integration. In 1957, responding to the crisis in Little Rock, Rothschild helped draft the “Ministers’ Manifesto,” a statement signed by eighty Black and white Atlanta clergy calling for moderation and obedience to law. That, and his friendship with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., made the Jewish leader and his temple prime targets for radical segregationists like Stoner.³²

The Atlanta bombing was the work of NSRP loyalists. Within a matter of days, city police—aided by ADL investigators sent down from New York—arrested five men, all of whom were connected to the party: thirty-five-year-old draftsman George Bright, who had known Stoner and Fields since he joined the Columbians in 1946; United White Party cofounder Wallace Allen; Chester Griffin, Georgia state organizer for the NSRP; and two longtime members of Stoner’s Christian Anti-Jewish Party, brothers Robert and Richard Bowling. All five suspects were denied bail.³³

The message these five men sent to the city’s Jews, and Southern Jews in general, was clear: if you want to avoid further death and destruction return to your pre-World War II ways, when Jews and Blacks knew their “proper” place. No government, George Bright explained, could force integration on “people who didn’t want that social set up … I’ve not yet met one white person who wants to socialize or mingle with one of another race.”³⁴

Reactions to the Atlanta bombing were immediate. President Eisenhower interrupted the cornerstone-laying ceremonies at New York City’s Protestant Interchurch Center to tell the press, “I think we would all share in the feeling of horror that any person would want to desecrate the holy place of any religion, be it a chapel, a cathedral, a mosque, a church, or a synagogue.” Eisenhower ordered the FBI to assist Atlanta police in apprehending those responsible for the violence, marking the first time the FBI was dispatched to investigate a bombing. Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield accused every “political rabble rouser” of being “the godfather of every sneaking dynamiter and cross-burner in the South today.” Stoner and Fields would have taken Hartsfield’s words as a compliment.³⁵

The police identified the bombers almost immediately, but convincing a jury to convict them was quite another matter. The day after the explosion, police wrested a confession from Chester Griffin. Fearing jailhouse informants, Griffin asked detectives W. K. “Jack” Perry and C. J. Strickland to take him to Grant Park, where they would not be overheard. If his compatriots found out he had talked, Griffin explained, “they would kill him.” He told the detectives that George Bright was the one who had “built the bomb” and planned the attack, but they were also “getting a lot of coaching from J. B. Stoner. J. B. was more or less an advisor to them.” Stoner had supplied the materials to make the bomb but left Atlanta before the explosion. The three men returned to the police station, where a stenographer took Griffin’s statement.³⁶

Despite Griffin’s confession, Perry and Strickland were disappointed they could not find any direct evidence linking Stoner to the crime. The police believed that Stoner was an important intermediary in the terrorist network Nacirema (“American” spelled backward), which was responsible for more than sixty Southern bombings during the late 1950s and ’60s. Griffin later retracted his confession, insisting the bombing had been the work of Communist Jews who hoped “to discredit and smear the rapidly growing and brave National States Rights Party.”³⁷

The five suspects were indicted on October 17, but only George Bright was brought to trial. The former Columbian was represented by James Venable, Imperial Klonsel of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the same attorney who had defended Emory Burke in 1947. Venable called several witnesses who denounced the key prosecution witness, Leslie Rogers, a janitor who had joined the NSRP as an FBI informant. The party turncoat, Venable claimed, “could not be trusted under oath.” Defense witnesses Edward Fields and Matt Koehl insisted the bombings were part of a “Jewish conspiracy.” After three days of deliberation, the jury deadlocked at 9–3 in favor of conviction with a recommendation against the death penalty. As a juror who voted for acquittal told reporters, “You can’t send a man to the penitentiary for life just because he’s a Jew-hater.”³⁸

Bright was reindicted two weeks later and brought to trial once again. On January 22, 1959, after deliberating for two hours and eight minutes, a second jury acquitted him on all charges. They accepted an alibi from Marilyn Craig, an inmate of Milledgeville State [Mental] Hospital, who testified during an allegedly “lucid interval” that Bright had spent the night of the bombing with her. The jury may also have been influenced by rumors of phone calls made by the Confederate Underground to the grand jury foreman and assistant foreman threatening to “kill all of you who indicted those innocent men.” Following the verdict, prosecutors dropped all charges against the remaining four men. No one was ever convicted of the bombing.³⁹

The only blowback from the bombing was felt by Jesse Stoner. Two weeks after his name surfaced as a suspect in the temple bombing, State Farm Insurance fired Stoner and took back the car they had given him. The NSRP counsel complained to company secretary Ethel Dasher that he lost his job because of pressure brought by the FBI and “Jewish money.” He considered it a small price to pay for a major victory. Undaunted, he allegedly offered longtime Klan leader William Morris a new deal: his “boys” would target Martin Luther King Jr.—whom he derisively referred to as Martin Luther Coon—and “blow him up or do whatever was necessary, he or his family or anybody who was in the house.”⁴⁰

Actions often have unintended consequences. The bombing of the temple generated an outpouring of sympathy for Atlanta’s Jewish community, but it also created deep resentment within the nation’s Black community. That one incident, George Kellman explained, drew more attention, denunciations, and donations than “70 dynamitings of Negroes’ buildings.” During the past four years, Kellman observed, “Negroes have been slain (as in the Emmett Till case) and there have been over 400 recorded instances … wherein Negroes have been shot, suffered mayhem, have been thrown out of jobs, received dire threats and have been otherwise seriously mistreated.” Many Black leaders resented the disproportionate outpouring of sympathy and financial aid for victimized Jewish communities. Kellman understood their displeasure. No Jewish homes were dynamited, no Jewish deaths resulted from the bombing spree, and very few Jews had crosses burned on their front lawns.⁴¹

The successful attack on the Atlanta synagogue and subsequent failure to convict the perpetrators unleashed a wave of international antisemitic violence known as the Swastika Epidemic. On Christmas Eve 1959, vandals desecrated a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, defacing it with Nazi symbols and slogans and triggering an unprecedented number of swastika-desecrations throughout Europe, Latin America, Australia, and the United States. Within a month, authorities reported attacks on Jewish synagogues, community centers, and day schools in thirty-four countries and almost every major capital city. By spring 1960, over 1,000 incidents had been reported throughout the world.⁴²

The Swastika Epidemic reached the United States on January 3, 1960, when a group of young punks smeared swastikas on the walls of New York City’s most prominent synagogue, Temple Emanu-El. A distraught George Kellman reported that “more than one-half of the cities in the United States experienced some of this type of vandalism.” Between December 26, 1959, and March 1, 1960, approximately 637 antisemitic incidents occurred in 236 American cities. While the brunt of the desecrations occurred in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, swastika defilements were also reported in Provo, Utah; Marshalltown, Iowa; LaCrosse, Wisconsin; and Dowagiak, Michigan. Antisemitism was not just a Southern problem.⁴³

No one was killed in any of these incidents, but they raised the level of fear in Jewish households across the nation. The joy of attending services at a local synagogue or relaxing at a Jewish community center was now marred by a notable sense of unease. Worse yet, authorities in many Northern cities did little to stem the rising tide of hate.

Abe Shoenfeld took the desecration of a New York synagogue personally. Temple Emanu-El reigned as the city’s leading reform congregation, and perhaps the most important synagogue in the United States. Soon after a swastika was painted on the building, “the police rushed into my place, three or four of them.” Shoenfeld had been working with New York City cops since the early twentieth century, when he helped them break up several gangs. Older cops knew him and trusted him. But not the younger ones. When several recently hired police asked if he knew who was responsible for the defacing, he later reported, he had given them his “prime suspect, a young chap.” The police found the suspect at a local church in Brooklyn fixing his priest’s ham radio. Convinced that “he [was] a good boy,” the cops released him. No arrest was ever made.⁴⁴

Violence against Jews accelerated in May 1960, after an eight-person Israeli Mossad team traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” and took him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. He was sentenced to death in December 1960 and hanged in the predawn hours of June 1, 1962. Eichmann’s apprehension, AJC leaders explained, “provided anti-Semites with a springboard for contesting the fact that six million Jews were murdered, and for promoting charges of ‘Jewish gangsterism and kidnapping.’” Ed Fields denounced the kidnapping in unambiguous terms. “Are we going to crawl in the dirt in the name of Jewry, and beg Jews to forgive the White Race because a Whiteman once meted out Justice to the Jews? I say NO, A THOUSAND TIMES NO! … Whatever the final solution to the Jewish problem turns out to be, it will be the Jew who will bring it upon himself.”⁴⁵

The Southern bombings, the Swastika Epidemic, Eichmann’s kidnapping, and President Eisenhower’s signing of another Civil Rights Act that May served as welcome fodder for the National States Rights Party’s first political campaigns. Now that members had grabbed the nation’s attention, the NSRP presented itself as the only party that could stop the ongoing terror. The acquittal of George Bright, observed one AJC official, encouraged “extremists and violent agitators from both the North and the South” and gave a “new impetus” to NSRP recruitment. Recent efforts by young Black and white activists to force integration through sit-ins and direct action also sparked increased membership in the Klan and White Citizens Councils. Their combined membership represented tens of thousands of potential voters who would welcome more radical solutions than those offered by the two mainstream parties.⁴⁶

Determined to carve out a place as the nation’s leading third party, delegates to the NSRP convention in April 1959 selected Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as their presidential nominee and retired rear admiral John Crommelin as their vice-presidential candidate. Faubus earned the admiration of segregationists in 1957, when he defied the Supreme Court by ordering the state’s National Guard to prevent Black students from attending Little Rock Central High School.

During the presidential campaign of 1960, NSRP candidates ran on a platform that promised to restore the time-honored traditional values. Only their party could make America, not just the South, great again. The “Democratic and Republican Parties,” they proclaimed, “[were] controlled by the Jew-Communists and cater[ed] to the Jewish and Negro bloc vote.” Both betrayed the white race by embracing the “Jewish-Communist Conspiracy which [was] rapidly conquering our America and smothering our liberties” to benefit “International Jewish finance.” Anyone who voted for either party “[would] be voting for the death of the White Race.” True Americans no longer had to hold their noses and choose between the lesser of two evils. White Anglo-Saxons now had their “own political party—the National States Rights Party.”⁴⁷

The NSRP proposed to transform the fabric of American social and political life. Only they could save the white race and “preserve this Nation and the freedom handed down to us by our ancestors.” Ballots, not bombs, were needed to bring this about. “Only through a political movement,” their constitution declared, “can we unite our people and bring the government back into the hands of the White Christian majority.”⁴⁸

The united White Supremacist movement that Emory Burke, Jesse Stoner, Edward Fields, and James Madole had long envisioned had finally come into being. None of them truly believed their new party could win the 1960 presidential election, not without the support of the Ku Klux Klan and various White Citizens Councils. But they could establish a presence and agenda that might unseat one if not both parties within several decades. Crommelin, Madole declared, was “the only major political candidate in America today” who could “break the grip of the Communist-Jewish power centers in New York and Washington; and return control of our State government to you White Christian Alabamians, my own people.” Only men like him and Orval Faubus were capable of “paving the road for the ultimate liberation of the American people.”⁴⁹

No one campaigned harder or in more places for NSRP candidates than Jesse Stoner. In the months before the election, he spoke to anti-integrationists in Detroit, Chicago, Louisville, Miami, and Jacksonville and on multiple stops in Delaware, Virginia, and Ohio. He also worked to expand his base of support among the poor “dirty-collar” crowd by organizing the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and declaring himself its first imperial wizard. He used donations to the Christian Knights to cover his modest living expenses. Stoner turned down a lucrative offer to join an Atlanta law practice, explaining he would “rather spend his time fighting Jews than checking court records.” He did not care about money; he was a true believer who was driven by a greater cause.⁵⁰

The presidential election did not turn out the way NSRP leaders hoped. The neophyte party earned ballot slots in Arkansas, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Delaware. However, their chances for garnering significant numbers of votes were stymied when Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy asked Faubus to withdraw. The Massachusetts senator and first Catholic to run for the highest office since Al Smith in 1928 feared he might lose the tight election if the Arkansas governor drained off vital Southern votes. Faubus agreed not to campaign on the NSRP ticket. “We are happy to report,” a delighted AJC leader noted, “that Faubus has, at least, in the instance of Florida, specifically declined the nomination.”⁵¹

The Faubus–Crommelin ticket received 44,984 votes out of 68.4 million cast, 0.07 percent of the presidential total. To unseat Democrats and Republicans, the NSRP needed more extensive alliances and more innovative ways of getting their message out to a broad electorate. Addressing a meeting of NSRP and American Nazi Party supporters in Chicago six months later, Edward Fields called for “peace and friendship with all other rightwing movements.”⁵²

That was easier said than done. American fascists were still riven by jealousies and rivalries on the right. If they were to succeed against either mainstream party, let alone the powerful so-called international Jewish–Communist conspiracy, they needed a leader who could effectively communicate their ideology—a leader who could speak on behalf of all nationalists, with sufficient charisma to make racism and antisemitism respectable. More than anything else, nationalists needed a leader who could take their diverse movement into the modern media age. That man was not Jesse Stoner or James Madole, but the newest major player on the fascist front, retired Navy commander and war veteran George Lincoln Rockwell.

12.

The Most Media-Savvy Nazi in America

George Lincoln Rockwell never expected to become the bridge between postwar White Supremacists and their modern offspring such as the Aryan Nations and Proud Boys. It took participation in World War II and the Korean War for the charismatic Navy commander to realize what he and fellow Americans were fighting for: a white America free of Jews and Blacks.

More than any hate group leader of his time, Rockwell was a showman and master of publicity who brought White Supremacists into the modern media age. He utilized provocative staged performances, newspaper interviews, and radio and television appearances to bring his message to millions of Americans: the Holocaust never happened; Jews were destroying the nation by deluding Blacks into believing they were the equals of whites; and both needed to be removed from America, permanently. Rockwell’s flair for the dramatic attracted former military personnel, young toughs, and longtime haters searching for a dynamic leader who reflected their ideas. His American Nazi Party never had more than a few hundred paid members, but the publicity it generated emboldened racists well into the twenty-first century. Contemporary groups from the Aryan Nations to the White Aryan Resistance consider Rockwell one of the godfathers of White Supremacy.

George Lincoln Rockwell was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 9, 1918. Unlike Emory Burke, Jesse Stoner, or James Madole, Rockwell grew up in a household filled with fun and humor rather than hate and antisemitism. His mother, Claire (née Schade), and her sister Arline were dancers and actresses who had performed with their parents as the “Four Schades” on the booming vaudeville circuit. His father, George “Doc” Lovejoy Rockwell, was a successful vaudeville and radio comedian who, in the words of his son, “set America laughing as it had never laughed before.” The family home was visited by prominent Jewish entertainers such as Groucho Marks, George Burns, and Jack Benny and by journalist Walter Winchell, for whom young George had a “warm liking and admiration.” Listening to them tell “side-splitting” jokes with his father “was one of those precious and rare times when life is 100% positive fun.” The fun in young George’s life took a downward turn when his parents divorced six years after his birth. He and his younger brother Bobby spent the school year with their mother in rural Illinois and summers at their father’s luxurious oceanfront home in Maine.¹

Jews and Blacks were a normal part of Rockwell’s childhood. He attended Atlantic City High School where many of his “best friends were Jews or hottentots.” There “may have been some slight vestiges of prejudice in my up-bringing,” he later wrote, “but no more than in the up-bringing of millions of other boys who are not leading Hitler movements.” George also attended a boarding school in New England, but the arrogant student never quite fit in. Even as a young man, Rockwell thought himself smarter than everyone else: “I found it was extremely easy in school for me to outwit and cozen my teachers, so that I could get by with almost no work.”²

In 1938 Rockwell entered Brown University, where its director of admissions told him he had the worst scholastic record of anyone ever admitted but also the highest College Aptitude Test scores. At Brown, he began rebelling against the dominant liberal ideology of his teachers and fellow students. He came to see liberalism as the “pimping little sister of communism.” The young undergraduate also grew to hate President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he considered a demagogue, and German chancellor Adolf Hitler, whom he then thought to be a “vicious monster.”³

In March 1941, the disgruntled student abandoned his studies and enlisted in the Naval Air Corps, where he trained as a fighter pilot. Seeing action in the South Pacific, Rockwell rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. After being mustered out of the service in October 1945, the decorated aviator and his wife, Judith (née Aultman), moved to Maine, where he eked out a living as a sign painter and freelance photographer. Hoping to pursue a lucrative career in commercial art, he moved his family to New York City, where he studied art under the GI Bill of Rights at the Pratt Institute of Design. Rockwell proved a gifted graphic artist and won a major prize for an advertisement he designed for the American Cancer Society. Hoping to make his fortune but overestimating his abilities, he returned to Maine to start an ad agency, which quickly went bankrupt. This would be the first of several unsuccessful business ventures.⁴

Following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the naval reserve officer was recalled to active duty and trained fighter pilots at the Naval Air Support School in San Diego. Rockwell’s shift toward antisemitism and far-right politics began while living in conservative Southern California. Like many Americans, he was worried about the Soviet Union’s exploding its first atomic bomb in August 1949 and by the subsequent discovery that American spies were sending atomic secrets to Russia. After meeting a rabidly antisemitic couple who shared his admiration for General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Joseph McCarthy, he began reading a series of right-wing publications, including Conde McGinley’s popular antisemitic newspaper, Common Sense. His readings convinced him that Communism, which he abhorred as antithetical to true American values, “was not only Jewish, but the Jews boasted about its Jewishness.” The Russian Revolution, he concluded, had not been Russian at all, “but almost wholly led by Jews.” His views about the Jewish menace were further strengthened after attending a rally led by charismatic minister Gerald L. K. Smith.⁵

Rockwell’s near mystical conversion to Nazism came in 1951 after reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was tantamount to a religious awakening in which he heard the word of God. “In Mein Kampf,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I found abundant ‘mental sunshine’ … Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like thunderclaps and lightning bolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness … I was transfixed, hypnotized … I wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it … I realized that national Socialism, the iconoclastic world view of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific racial idealism—actually a new ‘religion.’” The man he had loathed as a teenager was in fact the White Savior of the twentieth century. Reading Hitler’s words over and over again led to “the end of one Lincoln Rockwell, the ‘nice guy’—the dumb ‘Goy’—and the beginning of an entirely different person.”⁶

The Navy veteran’s Nazi conversion did not sit well with his wife. With their marriage marked by constant tension, Judith divorced her husband and took their two daughters to Connecticut. Rockwell’s time as a bachelor was short lived. In November 1952, the Navy sent him to Keflavik, Iceland, where he spent two years as a pilot and achieved the rank of commander. While there, he met and married Thora Hallgrimsson, niece of Iceland’s ambassador to the United States.

Rockwell was never shy about his opinions, which grew more vocal after his conversion experience. But voicing those opinions while on active duty did not sit well with his superiors. Disturbed by his “public and open espousal of race and religious hatred,” the Navy gave him an honorable discharge on October 20, 1954. Angered by what he considered an unfair humiliation, Rockwell returned to United States determined to become a leader in organizations that would fight the Communist–Jewish menace.⁷

The Midwesterner’s evolution as a Nazi activist was deeply influenced by his participation in groups formed by more experienced men such as Burke, Stoner, and Madole. Like many entering the White Supremacist world, he both joined and formed a variety of groups. In 1956, while running his own public relations and advertising firm in Washington, D.C., he hoped to unite a fragmented nationalist movement by founding the American Federation of Conservative Organizations. When the group failed to attract more than a handful of members, he allied with Burke, Stoner, and Edward Fields in forming that United White Party in 1957. The following year, he joined the trio as a founding member of the National States Rights Party.⁸

Rockwell was a relative newcomer when he attended the NSRP convention. He was delighted to connect with Emory Burke and Jesse Stoner but ultimately did not want to be just another nationalist leader. Like Burke, Stoner, and Madole, he wanted to be the preeminent fascist in America, the one all others rallied around. Like many White Supremacist leaders, he proved unwilling to swallow his ego and place his cause ahead of his personal ambition. This embrace of ego would ultimately prove the fatal flaw that prevented the fragmented nationalist movement from becoming the force Rockwell hoped it would become.

Rockwell wanted nationalists to embrace a far more aggressive public campaign against Blacks and Jews. In February 1958, as NSRP leaders were holding their first organizing meetings, Rockwell moved his family to Newport News, Virginia, and formed a partnership with wealthy racist and antisemite Harold Arrowsmith Jr. Rumored to be worth $150 million, Arrowsmith was convinced that Rockwell could bring his ideas to a larger public. Rockwell found Arrowsmith to be “the most violent Jew hater” he had ever met and was delighted when his benefactor agreed to fund a new organization, the National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination. Arrowsmith provided him with printing equipment to publish material documenting the Jewish–Communist conspiracy and enough money to rent a home and open an office in downtown Arlington, Virginia.⁹

Rockwell proved a consummate salesman whose best pitch was selling himself. He made his dramatic public entrance on the nationalist scene by organizing a series of highly visible publicity stunts. On July 27, 1958, twelve days after President Dwight Eisenhower sent 3,500 marines to Lebanon to protect President Camille Chamoun from opponents who wanted a more anti-Israel government, Rockwell and a small cadre of loyalists picketed the White House with signs declaring DON’T FIGHT ANOTHER WAR TO SAVE THE JEWS, COMMUNISM IS JEWISH, and SAVE IKE FROM THE KIKES. Rockwell’s followers organized similar picketing in Atlanta and Louisville. Among those watching the Washington, D.C., protest were local Anti-Defamation League operatives who took pictures of Rockwell and his men.¹⁰

Rockwell’s fortunes took a turn for the better in August, when he joined the National States Rights Party. But his optimism was short lived. Following the bombing of Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple in October 1958, police and FBI agents raided his premises in Virginia for evidence of complicity. Local residents repeatedly complained to authorities about Rockwell greeting people with “Sieg Heil” while wearing a swastika armband over his brown shirt. The former navy commander was cleared of any involvement in the explosion but the negative publicity he received led Harold Arrowsmith to end their partnership and take back the presses he had purchased for Rockwell. Worse yet, after local anti-Nazi residents attacked Rockwell’s headquarters with bricks, Molotov cocktails, and death threats, his wife, Thora, returned to Iceland with their children and filed for divorce.¹¹

Rockwell came away from the incident convinced that only an openly Nazi party could attract “the kind of daring, bold, devil-may-care fighting YOUNG men we need” to defeat American Jewry. He admired the men leading the NSRP but believed their organization suffered a fatal flaw: they preached a regional message rather than one that would attract a national and international constituency. Focusing solely on segregation would never appeal to “the victims of the Jews” living outside the South. Separation, not segregation, was needed to transform the nation.¹²

Rockwell was an egotist but not a fool. During his formative political years, he looked for advice from men more experienced in movement politics. Disenchanted with the NSRP, he contacted James Madole in the fall of 1958 hoping to form an alliance with the nation’s most prominent Nazi. Rockwell knew from friends in New York that Madole had been profoundly shaken by a near assassination in February. Angered by the NRP leader’s repeated attack on Jews, Al Richman had shown up one night at Madole’s apartment on West Ninetieth Street with a gun, tied up Madole and his mother, Grace, and announced his intention to kill both. But the would-be assassin had not been able to pull the trigger. The Jew, a contemptuous Madole later suggested, “lacked the fortitude to commit the act of murder.” Richman fled the apartment and was later wounded in a shootout with police and committed to a psychiatric hospital. Despite his bluster, an unnerved Madole retreated from activities as he recovered from a brush with death.¹³

When Rockwell approached a shaken Madole to discuss merging his American Nazi party with the more established National Renaissance Party, Madole refused. The New York Nazi resented the fact that the far less experienced Rockwell wanted him to be his minister of propaganda rather than the other way around; he resented being asked to be Joseph Goebbels to Rockwell’s Adolf Hitler. Rockwell’s hoped-for Nazi alliance never happened. But Madole agreed to distribute any literature Rockwell sent him and to allow Rockwell’s New York agents to attend NRP meetings.¹⁴

Madole’s rejection proved a minor setback. Never short of confidence, Rockwell believed he could supersede Madole, Stoner, and Burke by leading a new international movement that would save the world from the Jewish–Communist threat and the American people from the threat posed by miscegenation. His recent divorce and political failures only steeled his determination to devote his life to the cause. “Unlike the millions of my fellow ‘right wingers,’” he wrote in his autobiography, “I had become a hardened and determined revolutionary, destined either to achieve the aims of which they only talked, or die.”¹⁵

In March 1959, Rockwell set out to revive Hitler’s dream by launching the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists. He believed that voters wanted a party with a vision of government that would excite citizens frustrated by compromised traditional parties. His party, Rockwell insisted, would create a government based on high principles, not hate. He offered followers a “doctrine of idealism” and “sacrifice” as an alternative to the Jewish selfishness that had polluted American politics. “We believe that an honest man can never be happy in a naked scramble for material gain and comfort.” Only by fighting for their race and “for the common good of his people” could true Americans stop the influence of “parasitic Jews and their Marxism.” Without such a valiant battle, the nation would “sink forever in a brown chaos of degradation, slavery and eventual death.”¹⁶

The Nazi führer promised patriots a path toward national salvation and preservation of the white race. His party would create a “racially realistic, socially progressive, international world Order which we must have, if we are to remain masters of our own planet.” To that end, Rockwell would abolish the United Nations, the Federal Reserve System, and progressive education and replace them with a worldwide fascist body that would bring peace and harmony to the peoples of the earth. He would restore traditional patriarchal domestic order by declaring the “father as master of the house” and providing government grants that would keep mothers at home producing Aryan babies. Pledging to use “only legal, constitutional means to win power,” his party vowed to hold a constitutional convention and pass laws to punish those who had brought “this great Nation to the very brink of extinction.”¹⁷

Expansive in his views of government, Rockwell was as narrow as other nationalists in his racial and religious policies. Adopting a platform like that of Stoner’s and Madole’s parties, Rockwell promised “to free humanity from Jewish domination and subversion in all their forms.” They would do that by creating an International Treason Tribunal “to investigate, try, and execute all Jews proved to have taken part in Marxist or Zionist plots of treason against their Nations or humanity.” Non-Jews who acted as fronts for “Jewish treason or subversion” would be hung in front of the U.S. Capitol and left there for everyone to see. Rockwell insisted that his party was not antisemitic, that it only opposed “treasonous” Jews; but he suggested that about 95 percent of American Jews were guilty of treason.¹⁸

Embracing the most appealing aspects of Stoner’s two anti-Jewish parties, Rockwell vowed to cancel all debts Christians owed Jews. Money would flow from the greedy hands of Jews into the bank accounts of long-exploited true Americans.¹⁹

Rockwell blamed Jews for the Civil Rights movement and current racial unrest. They had led Blacks, a race he considered fundamentally lazy and ignorant, to believe they could achieve equality with whites. Yet his party proved far more sympathetic to Blacks than the NSRP or the National Renaissance Party were. Once in power, his government would solve the nation’s race problem by appropriating $10 billion a year for five years to build a “modern, industrial nation in Africa, complete with shopping centers, airlines, super-highways, cities and handsome suburbs.” The government would pay every Black family of five or more who emigrated to Africa $10,000 to help them build homes and establish businesses. No Black man or woman would be forced to move, but those who remained behind would be forcibly removed from their homes and sent to “relocation centers” in desolate areas of the country.²⁰

In December 1959, Rockwell scaled back his international ambitions in favor of building a strong domestic constituency. To achieve “maximum media attention,” he renamed his organization the American Nazi Party and began recruiting young men to his Virginia compound. The name may have been American, but the party’s playbook was right out of Hitler’s Nazi ideology. Adopting swastika flags, uniformed storm troopers, and open declarations of his desire to murder all Jews by gassing them, Rockwell called the Holocaust “a monstrous and profitable fraud” and insisted that the six million Jews who allegedly had perished in concentration camps actually had “died happily and richly in the Bronx, New York.”²¹

Could Rockwell really accomplish what Madole and others had failed to achieve: a union of all nationalist, fascist, and Nazi groups here and abroad? Far from being delusional, Rockwell was convinced the far right was ready to embrace a new leader. In 1959, the Cold War was at its height and the two most courageous warriors on the far right—Senator Joseph McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur—had disappeared from the scene. Rockwell found leaders of the National States Rights Party too focused on racial segregation rather than racial separation. Likewise, he criticized Madole and his National Renaissance Party for being too reliant on ideas rather than direct action. Madole’s minions lacked a visible street presence that would intimidate their enemies. He was equally dismissive of the Ku Klux Klan. Its reign of “violent attacks” might be popular in the rural South, but “millions in the North, West and Central parts of America see the beatings and terrorism as evidence that the South must be ‘put down’—that Ike was right in sending the troops to Little Rock.” Nationalists would never succeed by focusing on regional issues. His party would appeal to “good Irish Catholics in Boston, the race-ignorant Westerners, the factory workers and truck drivers of America, the isolated farmers, the booming Californians and the Southern racists, all the whole, Christian Americans.”²²

Rockwell considered the latest entry on the nationalist scene, the John Birch Society, founded in 1958, to be far too moderate; they were more concerned with attracting respectable conservatives than far-right warriors for the cause. Taken collectively, the Nazi leader considered these groups to be “reactionaries pure and simple—nothing less. They are all fighting, not to create anything positive, but to preserve their favored position, whether economically or racially.” Rockwell promised to create a radically new America.²³

Operating out of a run-down farmhouse in Arlington, Rockwell was convinced he would become the nation’s most prominent far-right leader through the sheer force of his personality and his clever use of mass media to attract a new generation of supporters. Standing six feet, three inches and weighing 200 pounds, and usually seen smoking his signature corncob pipe, the well-spoken Rockwell was the kind of imposing Aryan figure who attracted admirers. As one of his early followers noted, “Rockwell had a type of charisma, he had the ability to attract people like a magnet, and I admit I was one of them.” Within months of founding the American Nazi Party (ANP), he succeeded in recruiting former military personnel, tough working-class men, and a smattering of high school and college students looking for a cause. Men like Eugene Colton and J. V. Morgan were military veterans who considered themselves “100% loyal to America” and joined the ANP to protect their country from Blacks and Jews. Others joined because being a Nazi gave them an air of importance. “Before I became a Nazi,” explained one recruit, “no one seemed to notice me, didn’t even seem to know I was around. Well, they sure notice me now.”²⁴

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Rockwell and storm troopers giving Nazi salute outside farmhouse (Getty Images)

According to a California Justice Department investigation, Rockwell attracted men who fell into one of several categories: those “who have drifted into the movement, been converted and actively participated as members, then drift out. Then there are the zealots—numbered somewhere in the dozens—who have for years dedicated their lives to the movement.” Storm troopers included men with “a good educational background and above average intelligence,” and men of “medium level of intelligence and schooling, but well-versed in German Nazism and National Socialism.” However, the vast majority were “the misfits and maladjusted of society,” those with “little education and limited intelligence who lack the capacity of comprehension.” New members were elevated to storm-trooper status only after participating “in at least five ‘actions’ that leaders consider potentially dangerous.”²⁵

Rockwell wanted warriors willing to devote their lives—not just a few weeks or years—to the cause. By April 1959, he had welcomed nine volunteers into his officer corps, while twelve more men awaited initiation. The dramatic initiation ceremony involved pricking the member’s cheek with a razor blade, dipping the blood on the border of a swastika flag, and swearing an oath of “absolute loyalty, even unto death” to Hitler and Rockwell. Members also swore to administer “swift and ruthless Justice” to “traitors to my race and nation.”²⁶

Imitating Hitler’s early brownshirt movement, Rockwell insisted that his storm troopers wear brown shirts, leather belts, black boots, and swastika armbands. Proud of his party and its cause, Rockwell mounted a large swastika flag on his roof and illuminated it with floodlights so passersby could see it day or night.

The new American führer hoped to attract tens of thousands to his movement, but he ultimately failed. At its peak, the ANP had perhaps 500 national members and 100 hard-core dedicated Nazis. The problem was not the cause, but its leader. Rockwell’s effort to create a viable third party was plagued by one major shortcoming: his mean and arrogant nature. He was contemptuous of many of the ill-educated men who joined his party. “My co-workers are unbelievably … stupid … What a cross to bear! Sometimes it is even a relief to talk to a vicious and hateful … Jew after suffering with these pitiful ‘patriots.’”²⁷

The Commander, as he liked to be called, was equally contemptuous of most rank-and-file members of the far right. “I learned from bitter experience, that the human material of the right wing consists of 90% cowards, dopes, nuts, one-track minds, blabber-[mouths], boobs, incurable tight-wads and—worst of all—hobbyists—people who have come to enjoy a perverted, masochistic pleasure in telling each other forever how we are all being raped by the ‘shhh—you-know-whos,’ but who, under no conditions, would think of risking their two cars, landscaped homes, or juicy jobs to DO something about it.”²⁸

Rockwell was prone to frequent temper tantrums, and over time virtually every member was disciplined or expelled from the party. The ANP’s spartan barracks in Arlington, known by locals as “Hatemonger Hill,” lacked adequate heat and food, and daily life was often marked by intense conflict as storm troopers vied for their leader’s attention. He was mean to the men who worked with him—stingy with praise for their efforts and stingy with what little money he had. His men often went hungry, but not their leader. Rockwell only wanted two kinds of men, Abe Shoenfeld learned from one of his New York agents. “He who deserts everything, family, etc & devotes himself to the cause & lives in the barracks,” and men “who contribute money to the cause.” The men working with him, the agent observed, “live on peanuts & if Rockwell was secreting money & they discovered it they’d cut his throat.”²⁹

Disappointed with Rockwell’s cheapness, mean nature, and self-absorption, many die-hards left his American Nazi Party but not the movement. Instead, they simply moved back and forth between groups—often several times—until they found a comfortable place, be it in the NSRP, NRP, KKK, or some other nationalist group. The most militant of Rockwell’s storm troopers tattooed swastikas on their left arms. But that did not stop men such as John Patler from leaving the ANP and founding their own far-right parties.

Despite his shortcomings, Rockwell succeeded in launching a movement that attracted worldwide attention. Conservatives, he wrote in 1960, “lacked any real national and popular medium of expression.” Rockwell changed that. He understood that modern movement politics was as much about entertainment as ideas. To be successful, a party had to offer members excitement and exhilaration. Stoner’s National States Rights Party and Madole’s National Renaissance Party, he argued, lacked the drama and public presence that would attract national audiences and supporters. Both parties operated “rather clandestinely from post-office boxes, etc.” In contrast, the American Nazi Party believed in generating maximum publicity by “marching in the streets and fighting for our rights with our fists when necessary.” Whatever his supporters may have thought of him personally, the attention he brought to the cause boosted the morale of White Supremacists across the nation and brought new recruits into the movement.³⁰

It is worth pausing a moment to ask how a man leading a party with fewer than 1,000 members could go on to become a national figure. Today, more than sixty years later, it is Rockwell’s name, far more than that of Burke, Stoner, or Madole, that is known to a wide swath of Americans.

George Lincoln Rockwell represented a dramatic new era in the use of mass media for radical political ends. He had seen how his father’s many entertainer friends—Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, and the like—had relied on radio to amuse Americans. He grew up seeing how Father Charles Coughlin used his weekly antisemitic radio sermons to evolve from a minor priest in Royal Oak, Michigan, to a national figure who attracted forty million weekly listeners to his broadcasts. He considered mass media to be the fastest way to gain a mass audience. While Coughlin and his father’s friends used radio, Rockwell’s preferred venue was the latest medium of mass culture, television.

The American Nazi came to prominence at a time when television was making a major impact on American political life as well as entertainment. During the presidential debates of 1960, those who listened on radio insisted Richard Nixon won the evening; those who watched on television named John F. Kennedy the clear winner. We know which candidate and which medium eventually won.

Rockwell wanted to be a celebrity and not just a political leader. Whether people liked him or hated him was less important than gaining a platform to present his ideas to a national audience—an audience of citizens who voted leaders they admired into office. Rockwell understood the power of image-making long before his peers. In 1962, historian Daniel Boorstin published his prescient book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Celebrities, Boorstin, explained, were the creatures “of gossip, of public opinion, of magazines, newspapers, and the ephemeral images of movie and television screens.” The celebrity was neither good nor bad, neither great nor petty. The celebrity depended on image rather than deeds, and image had come to supersede deeds in the public’s imagination. “If the right ‘image’ will elect a President or sell an automobile, a religion, a cigarette, or a suit of clothes,” Boorstin reasoned, “why can it not make America herself—or the American Way of Life—a salable commodity all over the earth?”³¹

Rockwell believed that the right set of images could turn his Nazi party into a serious rival to the mainstream parties. In the new media age, a leader’s true inner qualities were less vital than the imaginary qualities that leader could project. “More important than what we think of the Presidential candidate,” Boorstin observed, “is what we think of his ‘public image.’ We vote for him because his is the kind of public image we want to see in the White House.”³²

Rockwell saw image-making, especially via television, as the future of American politics. That differentiated him not only from more traditional nationalist leaders, but from mainstream politicians as well. During the early 1960s, many Democratic and Republican politicians were offended by the idea of selling their ideologies on television; it seemed no different to them than selling soap. Some legislators were so upset by what they deemed the deceptive qualities of the new medium that they proposed bills to require candidates appearing on TV to disclose whether they were using makeup or hairpieces.³³

Rockwell’s brief stint in the advertising industry allowed him to see the benefits of image-making. The image, as Boorstin wrote, “is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan, or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product, or a service.” And who better to “craft” such a careful image than a former ad man. “When I was in the advertising game, we used to use nude women,” the Nazi leader boasted. “Now I used the Hakenkreuz [the swastika] and storm troopers. You use what brings them in.” More than any godfather of White Supremacy, Rockwell mastered the art of attracting publicity. The moment cameras appeared at one of his rallies, he snapped his heels together, thrust out his right arm in salute, and shouted three times, “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!” This infuriated his enemies, endeared him to nationalists, and catapulted him onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and into the lead story on nightly television news.³⁴

Rockwell used several media outlets to craft his celebrity image. His two periodicals, the Stormtrooper and the Rockwell Report, offered readers a regular analysis of the nationalist scene, praising his troops and lambasting his enemies. He also put his artistic talents to use drawing a series of outrageous racist cartoons for both publications.

Periodicals were for the already converted. Over the next several years, Rockwell mounted a series of publicity stunts aimed at reaching the unconverted. He learned the effectiveness of picketing the White House from Jesse B. Stoner—and did so on several occasions. But he went far beyond Stoner and organized controversial public demonstrations that garnered maximum publicity by having his men always appear in Nazi uniforms. The perverse appeal of featuring Nazis marching in the United States only fifteen years after the end of World War II proved too enticing for media outlets to ignore. In December 1960, Rockwell appeared on the front pages of the nation’s press when angry Jews attacked the brownshirts he sent to picket the opening of Exodus, a film about the founding of the State of Israel which he called a “filthy Zionist movie.” He garnered even more attention when a July Fourth demonstration in New York’s Union Square sparked a violent confrontation between ANP storm troopers and Jewish War Veterans that put him and his party on the front page of the New York Times and on the evening television news. “Rockwell is getting a lot of publicity,” Sheldon’s longtime undercover operative Joe Rudden (alias John J. Rich) informed him in June 1960, “which is just what he wants I think.”³⁵

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Cover of Rockwell’s The Stormtrooper magazine mocking Miami Jews (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

George Kellman, the AJC’s head of undercover operations, marveled at Rockwell’s ability to gain attention “by the ‘shock treatment’ advocating gas chambers, and glorifying Hitler.” Each of the Nazi’s public demonstrations was carefully orchestrated to attract Black and Jewish protestors who would inevitably attack him and his men—and generate more media coverage for his party. To ensure a large turnout of protestors, Rockwell always notified the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish War Veterans of upcoming demonstrations. He also launched a national speaking tour on colleges across the country, knowing that debates over free speech would generate tremendous media coverage—and hopefully fights with the audience. “The Jews confronting the swastika and Nazis become raging maniacs and I take advantage of that.”³⁶

Television cameras appeared at virtually every event anticipating riots; they were usually not disappointed. Local news stations captured a dramatic fight that broke out in a New York courtroom after Rockwell told a reporter that his party planned to gas “about eighty percent of the adult Jews” when they assumed power.³⁷

The Nazis attracted even greater attention that spring when Rockwell opened a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., by displaying swastika flags and playing the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi storm-trooper anthem, on loudspeakers. He and his men were severely beaten in a bloody melee and arrested for disorderly conduct. But it did not matter. Rockwell considered the rally a great victory. Television coverage of the event helped his party reach the eyes and ears of twenty million Americans. “We had won millions of dollars in priceless publicity; we had demonstrated that it is possible to defy the Jews and survive.” He boasted how repeated appearances on television “made the American Nazi Party the most dynamic, powerful name in the right wing in only a few months.”³⁸

Baiting Jews by appearing in Nazi uniforms and declaring the Holocaust a hoax was guaranteed to get Rockwell an audience. But his most audacious publicity stunts involved efforts to forge partnerships with a range of Black nationalist organizations. In April 1959, the Nazi head traveled to Chicago to meet S. A. Davis, a leader of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Jesse Stoner had written Davis two years earlier praising him for calling on his people to return to Africa. Rockwell went a step further. He met with Davis, had his picture taken with him, and used it in a pamphlet, “We Challenge the Jews,” in which he argued that Blacks were being denied the privilege of returning to Africa by Jews who used them as cheap labor and a captive voting bloc. The two groups never met again, but the unusual story gained Rockwell’s neophyte party national headlines.³⁹

Ten months later, an Anti-Nazi League operative warned James Sheldon that Rockwell planned to organize a Negro section of his party in New York City. That never happened but in June 1961, Rockwell and ten of his men attended a rally of 8,000 Black Muslims at the Uline Arena in Washington D.C. Rockwell had contempt for most Blacks but felt the Nation of Islam shared the same goal as the ANP: separation of the races. He told reporters that he had “the highest respect for Mr. Elijah Muhammad” and considered his group to be “fully in concert with their program.” Their only disagreement was over territory. “They want a chunk of America and I prefer that they go to Africa.” Elijah Muhammad, whom he proudly called a “Black Nazi,” knew that race mixing was a “Jewish fraud.” Rockwell remained confident that “a workable plan for separation of the races could be effected to the satisfaction of all concerned—except the communist-Jew agitators.”⁴⁰

The Nazi visit was well received. The following February, Rockwell and several storm troopers dressed in full Nazi uniforms walked into Chicago’s International Amphitheater, where more than 12,000 members of the Nation of Islam gathered for a Savior’s Day convention. After being searched by the Fruit of Islam Guard, the Black Muslims’ paramilitary unit, the Nazis were given seats of honor in the front row. Called on to address the crowd, Rockwell promised to do “everything in [his] power to help the Honorable Elijah Muhammad … [he] is right—separation or death!”⁴¹

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Rockwell and two Nazis at Nation of Islam Convention in Chicago, February 1962 (Magnum Photos)

Rockwell considered Black Nationalists Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X to be potential allies, but he had nothing but contempt for ordinary Black men and women. In May 1961, James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), announced his intention to send a busload of young “Freedom Riders” south to New Orleans to promote integration. Rockwell responded by launching a “Hate Bus Tour” that brought him national headlines, television coverage, and a large spread in Life magazine. Packing twelve storm troopers dressed in full Nazi gear into a Volkswagen van, he ordered them to follow the Freedom Riders and spread counter messages of racial separation wherever they stopped. Calling on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to provide his men with “protection from Jew and Negro hoodlums,” Rockwell insisted he was “sending a hate bus full of Nazis to urge respect for law and legal organizational efforts to preserve the white Christian republic established by our forefathers.”⁴²

To make their presence known, the Nazis plastered the blue and white van with bold lettered slogans, LINCOLN ROCKWELL’S HATE BUS, WE HATE RACE-MIXING, WE HATE JEW-COMMUNISM, and simply HATE BUS. Stirring up trouble was a way to gain media coverage, and media coverage generated new members. Stopping at one NAACP event, storm troopers dressed in blackface rushed in declaring, “Ah’s your Uncle Remus and Ah’s come to take you niggers back to Africa.” Two others infiltrated a civil rights march wearing gorilla costumes and carrying a placard that read JOIN OUR MARCH FOR CIVIL RIGHTS.⁴³

Rockwell flew down from Virginia to meet his men in New Orleans. When the Hate Bus arrived, the Nazis were greeted by a contingent of Holocaust survivors who carried razor blades with them in case of a fight. But it was Rockwell and his men who were arrested for disturbing the peace and spent the night in jail. The next morning, he was released on bail, while his storm troopers remained in jail. Rockwell undoubtedly earned the enmity of his men by insisting he was only able to raise enough money for his own bail. Whatever they may have thought of their absent leader, the jailed Nazis earned more publicity for their party by embarking on a hunger strike to protest their arrest.⁴⁴

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Rockwell and Hate Bus storm troopers (Getty Images)

Delighted with the publicity he received, Rockwell followed the Hate Bus stunt by founding a small record label, Hatenanny Records, which mocked traditional “hootenanny” folk music performances. His artists included country singer Odis Cochran and the Three Bigots, and the label released several singles that were sold mostly through mail order and at party rallies. He generated even more national attention throughout 1962 by speaking across the country at college campuses, where he and his storm troopers were regularly greeted with catcalls, thrown garbage, lots of shoving, and ever-present television cameras. After telling San Diego State University students of his desire to kill other Americans to “improve our country,” Rockwell was punched in the face by an outraged undergraduate.⁴⁵

Rockwell’s creative media strategy brought the ANP more publicity than any comparable organization. Yet, he never achieved the same membership numbers as his rivals. Publicity did not translate into mass admiration. Rockwell’s embrace of swastikas and Nazi uniforms brought him notoriety but at the cost of building a mass movement. Many Americans were sympathetic to his anticommunism, antisemitism, and racism but they would not embrace a leader who used a foreign Nazi symbol and attire embraced by Adolf Hitler. James Madole knew this well before Rockwell. Once he realized that audiences stopped listening to him as soon as they saw the swastika, he ordered his men to discontinue using the “emotion-ridden” emblem.⁴⁶

Despite the modest size of his party, the Nazi leader’s success in generating massive publicity came to worry the Red-obsessed FBI. Lacking any inside agents, the Bureau received inside information from Sheldon’s agent Joe Rudden. “George Lincoln Rockwell,” the Bureau observed, “is an egocentric and a chronic failure who created the shabby, small-time enterprise which he named the American Nazi Party in order to abate his tormenting ambitions to achieve fame.” Despite their distaste for the Commander, Bureau leaders confessed that his “disruptive tactics have brought national attention to Rockwell, inflating him and his group far beyond their due.”⁴⁷

The FBI assessment was correct. Rockwell’s stunts succeeded in garnering an unprecedented amount of attention. His clever manipulation of crowds, observed the AJC’s George Kellman, led to “riots, near-riots and other public disorders” that “projected Rockwell and what he stands for into the general press as legitimate ‘news.’” His organization received greater legitimacy in March 1961 when the Virginia legislature granted legal status to the American Nazi Party. Rockwell promised legislators he would achieve political power “by all legal means and elective process.”⁴⁸

Rockwell may have promised a peaceful path to power but his storm troopers’ barracks told a different story. The führer used donations from wealthy admirers to build a three-story home on the heavily wooded, twenty-six-acre lot in Arlington that served as Nazi headquarters. The original barracks, several hundred yards away, remained unchanged. Despite its run-down quality, his men drilled in preparation for Der Tag, the day the American Nazi Party would rule the nation. Rockwell lacked the funds to assemble a significant arsenal of weapons so he asked members to bring their own guns, rifles, and ammunition. Tony Ulasewicz, who monitored ANP activities for the New York City Police Department from 1958 to 1967, visited the military-style barracks in late 1961 and noticed “bullet holes punctured all the walls of his house.” Whatever his public declarations, Rockwell was prepared for violence. On the other hand, the self-absorbed Commander failed to provide his storm troopers with the tough military training and discipline needed to succeed.⁴⁹

By early 1961, the former Navy commander was convinced the time was right for his group to emerge as a serious third party. Americans were tired of seeing Republicans and Democrats cave in to Jewish pressure to support Israel. They were tired of politicians who refused to condemn the Jewish state for kidnapping Adolf Eichmann and illegally transporting him from Argentina to Israel to stand trial for alleged war crimes. Worse yet, Americans were tired of seeing Jews lead the current drive for integration, a movement that would destroy the white race.

Jews needed to be stopped before that happened. And the American Nazi Party pledged to do just that. Rockwell promised that within ten years Americans would awaken to the Jewish–Communist–Black threat and elect the beloved Commander as president. This was Rockwell’s ultimate vision: to see true Christian patriots marching in the streets in their Nazi uniforms fully armed and without a Jew or Black in sight; to see an America that looked white again.

The Nazi leader was savvy enough to know that a successful political movement needed more than publicity stunts. In March 1961, Rockwell boasted of having 500 members; two years later, he claimed to have 12,000 people “who are friendly to the cause.” Neither number was sufficient to sustain an effective new party. In this respect, the Virginia-based Nazi differed little from Stoner or Madole. Despite their enormous egos, each knew they needed to ally with other groups if they were to grow beyond being minor regional organizations.⁵⁰

Rockwell, Stoner, Madole, and Edward Fields continued to maintain their headquarters in the South but they each sent representatives to New York City in the early 1960s and charged them with recruiting men and women throughout the Northeast. Stoner’s bombing campaign had attracted a great deal of attention but not significantly more members. Like Rockwell, he needed to expand his reach beyond the former Confederacy.

The decision to send recruiting agents to New York proved a godsend to the three agencies spying on them. None had enough money to embed full-time operatives inside the geographically dispersed nationalist movement. However, once the ANP and NSRP sent recruiting agents to New York, Sheldon and Shoenfeld had local operatives in place who were able to get a closer look at the inner workings of these fascist organizations.

White Supremacists established strong branches in Chicago, Detroit, San Diego, and Los Angeles, as well as the Deep South and Southwest, but New York remained the nation’s fascist center, and the offices of the Truth Seeker were where myriad groups met to exchange information about their activities. Founded in 1873 as a progressive free-thought periodical, the Truth Seeker turned to the hard right in 1950 under the leadership of far-right publisher Charles Lee Smith. Each week, representatives from major nationalist groups met at the periodical’s office at 38 Park Row to discuss potential areas of cooperation. “The leaders of nearly all the [fascist] factions congregate there for gossip and planning,” the ANL’s most recent agent, William “Butch” Goring, observed. They also sought Smith’s largesse in underwriting the cost of their propaganda material.⁵¹

Despite the loss of Emmanuel Trujillo and Irene Dovale, James Sheldon still had agents provocateurs embedded inside the NRP who tracked the movements of Madole, Rockwell, and Stoner. His most important spies included Joe Rudden, “the alcoholic right hand man of Fuehrer James H. Madole,” and Goring, a Columbia University undergraduate who joined the group under false pretenses. Abe Shoenfeld’s longtime agent, “Reporter A,” who was deeply embedded in nationalist organizations, sent him regular reports about what was discussed—and cleavages he observed—while attending weekly meetings at Madole’s home and at the Truth Seeker.⁵²

AJC and ANL spies discovered repeated instances of petty jealousies and backstabbing among the men attending those gathering. Those regulars included George Lincke, whom Rockwell had sent to New York, where he quickly set up an ANP office in his apartment at 319 East Ninety-Third Street. Shoenfeld’s spy “W,” the journalist who attended meetings at Madole’s apartment and the Truth Seeker offices on a regular basis, noted how the blond Lincke distinguished himself by always wearing “two or three swastikas on his shirt, under his jacket.” Stoner and Fields sent Navy veteran William “Wild Bill” Hoff Jr., a man who spoke “with a minced, Brooklyn accent” and had the manner of “a bartender announcing a raffle,” to be the NSRP’s chief recruiting agent for the Northeast.⁵³

Sheldon’s and Shoenfeld’s operatives observed how many of the regular attendees were one-time “lieutenants” and “captains” who kept moving among organizations as they fell out with various leaders. All were now in New York looking for an organization that best pursued their ideas. Former ANP lieutenant John Patler and national secretary Daniel Burros, both part of Rockwell’s Hate Bus tour, left to form the American National Party and then left that to join the NRP. James K. Warner was a founding member and the first national secretary of the American Nazi Party but quit in 1961 to join the NSRP, where he served as associate editor of the Thunderbolt. Like Hoff, he attended Truth Seeker and NRP meetings when in New York and worked closely with Madole, a man Stoner and Fields far preferred to Rockwell. They admired Madole enough to ask him to assume chairmanship of the New York state chapter of the National States Rights Party, but Madole declined the offer. On the other hand, Roy Frankhouser, national organizer for the NSRP, and Matt Koehl, its one-time security head, left the party to work for Rockwell.⁵⁴

Whatever their shortcomings, these nationalists were all serious men dedicated to a common cause. They spent at least one afternoon a week at the Truth Seeker and several more days or nights attending meetings and rallies of their respective organizations. Individually, none of these leaders or their organizations posed a serious threat to democracy. They wanted to forge a mass political movement but for the time being they had to content themselves with being cells of scattered terrorists. Yet that could change. Sheldon and Shoenfeld agreed that any man who could unite this fractious group could claim leadership of the far-right movement. And a united far right did pose a threat to Jews, Blacks, and democracy. The problem, as Shoenfeld’s reporter told him, was that “Everyone wants to be the Fuehrer.”⁵⁵

No one wanted to be the führer more than George Lincoln Rockwell. He did whatever was needed to make that happen. Had he been able to forge a genuine partnership with James Madole, the two could have launched a powerful Nazi movement. But sharing leadership was not in Rockwell’s nature. Rather than cooperate, his first step was to expand his membership by stealing members away from Madole and the National Renaissance Party. Beginning in May 1960 and continuing through the next year, Rockwell traveled to New York to hold secret meetings aimed at advancing ANP fortunes—and never told Madole. The NRP leader envied Rockwell’s success in generating publicity, but was upset that the Commander, not he, was regularly interviewed on radio and television stations. Nevertheless, he was still willing to work together to advance their mutual cause.

Madole allowed Rockwell’s agents George Lincke and Seth Ryan to attend NRP rallies and weekly meetings at his apartment in hopes of building unity on the far right. They repaid his generosity, undercover agent Joe Rudden told Sheldon, “by trying to steal members.” Madole responded by kicking out anyone who attempted “to convert followers to the cause of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi party.”⁵⁶

Rockwell, Madole, Stoner, and Fields constantly talked about uncovering the ADL, AJC, and ANL spies in their midst. Sheldon and his counterparts took advantage of their fears and used information gathered from their operatives to fuel their paranoia that each rival was secretly working for the Jews. In May 1960, an extremely upset Rockwell complained, “word is going around that he [Rockwell] is an ADL agent.” Elizabeth Dilling, the preeminent female right-wing activist of the 1930s, warned fascists that Rockwell was being paid $30,000 by the ADL. Rockwell, in turn, insisted that Madole’s chief financial backer Frederick Charles Weiss was working with the ADL. Declaring a plague on both their houses, the supremacist periodical White Sentinel accused Rockwell and Madole of being “agents of the ADL.”⁵⁷

Sometimes nationalists destroyed each other’s credibility without the need of the ADL, AJC, or ANL. A strident anticommunist, Rockwell often gave the FBI information he uncovered about Jewish–Red activities. A great admirer of J. Edgar Hoover, the Commander insisted that only the FBI stood between America “and Communist total victory! Heil Hoover!” Like many on the far right, Rockwell considered Hoover their “patron saint.” Since the 1956 launch of their Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)—a series of covert and often illegal surveillance operations aimed at disrupting groups the Bureau deemed subversive—the FBI was devoting 15 percent of its efforts to “White Hate” and 85 percent to investigating “leftists” and minorities.⁵⁸

Rockwell warned the G-men that Edward Fields was “a congenital liar” and they should not believe anything he told them. When Fields found out about the Nazi’s cooperation with the Bureau, he wrote two articles in the Thunderbolt, attacking him as an FBI collaborator on the Jewish payroll: “Proof Rockwell Cooperates with Drew Pearson and ADL” and “FBI Counterspy Says Rockwell Sabotages Right Wing.” Rockwell denied the charges but James Warner, his first national secretary who now worked for the NSRP, insisted they were true: “without Pearson, Rockwell would have had very few members.” Rockwell filed a libel suit against Fields, which he won three years later. But by then it was too late to undo the damage to the Commander’s reputation.⁵⁹

By 1962, three years after Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party, the right-wing movement was badly splintered as its leaders continued to attack each other. Columbian founder Emory Burke, the highly respected grand old man of the far right, broke with the NSRP that November, accusing Fields and his associate editor James Warner of being “money grubbers and fakirs.” Rockwell played up the break with articles in the Rockwell Report, happily declaring, “Burke is in a battle with States Rights party.” But that happiness was short lived. Burke soon broke with Rockwell, whom he now accused of being a “terrible, uncouth person.” Unhappy with all fascist groups, Burke hoped to revive his own leadership position by forming the White American Nationalist Party with headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama.⁶⁰

Sheldon undermined far-right unity by providing valuable information about their activities to the FBI, the New York Police Department, and favored columnists Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson. AJC leaders preferred their time-honored approach of the “quarantine” method. They believed starving a movement of all publicity would eventually lead to its collapse. They called on newspaper editors and columnists and televisions station managers throughout the country to deny coverage to Rockwell and his men.

Unable to forge alliances with like-minded groups in the United States, Rockwell looked across the Atlantic to establish close ties with European Nazis and fascists. On July 29, 1962, he entered Britain illegally to attend a meeting of Colin Jordan’s British National Socialist Movement. The two men agreed to create the World Union of National Socialists, a consortium of Nazi parties in Great Britain, Chile, Denmark, France, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Australia, and the United States. Jordan was elected “world Führer” and Rockwell his deputy. They called for a “just and final settlement of the Jewish problem” and promised to enact a program that would unite the world’s youth in a new crusade for Aryan purity to counter Jewish danger and Black race mixing. The fascist group never achieved its goals. Rockwell was arrested and deported for defying a British Home Office ban on his entry to England. Several months later, Jordan was sentenced to nine months in prison for attempting to set up an illegal paramilitary force. Rockwell was immediately elevated to führer, but little was ever achieved.⁶¹ If he were to make his mark in the world, it would have to start in the United States.

Stoner and Fields hated Rockwell, who hated them, and Burke wanted nothing to do with either of their movements. Republican presidential aspirant Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society were attracting large numbers of men and women who wished to remain within the boundaries of seemingly more respectable conservatism. It would fall to James Madole to call for an end to enmity and a new era of nationalist unity. In October 1962, he approached the New York representatives of the NSRP and ANP and asked for their help in bringing “this country to its knees.” The best way to do that, he added, was by “holding street meetings” designed to capture national attention.⁶²

For once, Rockwell, Stoner, and Fields heeded Madole’s call to take to the streets with provocative public demonstrations that they hoped would propel them into the forefront of national attention. But they would do so in dramatically different ways: attacking a White Castle hamburger joint in the Bronx, marching on Washington, D.C., and bombing another church in Birmingham.

13.

Street Actions: The Battle for White Castle, the March on Washington, and Bombs in Birmingham

James Madole followed George Lincoln Rockwell’s publicity-garnering moves with a mixture of jealousy, admiration, and disgust. The New York führer had been leading the nation’s postwar Nazi movement since 1949, and yet it was Rockwell, a relative newcomer, who had seized the public’s attention in a way that no other far-right leader had. For his part, Rockwell praised Madole as “an extremely brilliant theorist,” but insisted his Nazi rival was “no fighting leader of a people’s mass movement.” That role would fall to Rockwell—or so he believed.¹

Despite their many differences, James Madole, George Lincoln Rockwell, and Jesse Stoner shared one key goal: to forge a united third party (which each believed they should lead) that would rival, if not supplant, Democrats and Republicans. These three men may have been respected leaders of postwar White Supremacy, but by 1963 there were dozens of far-right groups vying for prominence.

For a new party to succeed, it needed to offer voters a dynamic political vision and series of concrete actions that would lead them to switch long-standing political loyalties. Unlike the founders of the newly established John Birch Society, none of the three men saw himself as simply leading pressure groups that would push the mainstream parties to the right. They wanted to replace those parties with a political entity that would solve the Black and Jewish problem once and for all.

In the spring of 1963, leaders of the National Renaissance Party, the American Nazi Party, and the National States Rights Party designed a series of street actions to capture the nation’s attention and alert citizens to the dangers that lay ahead. Waiting in the background, in case any of these groups failed, was former Columbian head Emory Burke. Disgusted with petty rivalries among the three nationalist parties, he had reentered the fascist scene by organizing a new party and appointing himself president of Patriotic National Center and School of Racial Studies and Leadership Training in November 1962.2

James Madole was the first to act. He spent the winter and spring of 1962–63 laying the groundwork for establishing a united fascist front with headquarters in New York City and himself as its leader. New York had become the recruiting center for major nationalist organizations looking for allies and money in the Northeast. Despite their many differences, representatives from the National Renaissance Party, the American Nazi Party, the National States Rights Party, and breakaway groups like John Patler and Daniel Burros’s American National Party continued to meet every Saturday at the Truth Seeker offices in Manhattan to discuss their ongoing activities and identify areas of possible cooperation. Physical proximity to these joint meetings made it far easier for Madole than Rockwell or Stoner to keep tabs on the latest developments and to court agents from rival organizations. “We may have to align ourselves with those with whom we do not completely agree,” an increasingly pragmatic Madole concluded.³

Madole’s rhetoric took a far more aggressive turn during the early months of 1963. He insisted that the so-called Holocaust, in which the “Nazi regime exterminated six million Jews,” was a myth designed to evoke sympathy for Jews and money for their organizations. The Red Cross, he insisted, had “never found any ovens.” He blamed Jews for promoting the race-mixing that was destroying the Anglo-Saxon race. The solution was simple: “What we need is 6 inches of steel to handle our enemies.” To spread the word, Madole started taping his speeches and selling them for fifteen dollars.⁴

Madole learned from Rockwell that words alone were not sufficient. In May and July, he launched a series of aggressive street actions designed to propel the NRP past Rockwell and Stoner and into the forefront of radical white nationalism. Responding to Rockwell’s criticism that he and his men were too soft, Madole revived the Elite Guard storm trooper unit that Mana Truhill had joined in 1953, now calling it the Security Echelon (SE). Madole had come to realize that having his men appear in exact replicas of Nazi SS uniforms turned off Americans who held no admiration for Adolf Hitler, even if they approved of his ideas. Instead, he designed outfits without swastikas. His Security Echelon was composed of the toughest young men in the NRP who wore gray shirts, black boots, and thunderbolt armbands that replicated the old Columbian lightning bolt. Senior officers wore medals and badges that designated their rank and inflated their egos.

The Security Echelon provided the muscle for a series of street rallies in the heavily German Yorkville neighborhood, where the German-American Bund had reigned during the 1930s and early 1940s. The NRP’s “America First” rallies urged “patriotic” New Yorkers “disgusted with the tactics of Democratic and Republican politicians” to join their party. Traditional politicians, Madole warned, had allowed “our subways and city streets to be turned into miniature replicas of the Congolese jungle wherein civilized people dare not walk the sidewalks or enter community parks after dark!” The successful turnouts at these rallies led the NRP head to organize his biggest gathering yet: a Memorial Day demonstration to be held on First Avenue between Eighty-Fifth and Eighty-Sixth Streets on Saturday, May 25, 1963.5

The meeting was widely advertised by Madole and his opponents, with the result that some 2,500 to 4,000 people showed up that sunny afternoon. Most of those attending were curious onlookers who stood eight to ten deep behind wooden police barricades; others hung out of apartment windows and fire escapes. The wide avenue was lined with TV cameras, reporters, and radio broadcasters looking for a good story—and perhaps a little bloodshed.

Hoping to prevent violence, police moved onlookers to the west side of First Avenue, while Madole and five of his uniformed Security Echelon troopers set up a speaker’s platform on the east side. Leading the Nazi contingent was SE major Daniel Burros, a veteran of the Hate Bus tour who had recently broken with Rockwell. They were joined by a sympathetic crowd of 500 supporters who stood near a podium decorated with party symbols that harkened back to the Columbians: flags and banners featuring black lightning bolts in a white circle, on a field of red. Grace Madole, identified by the press as “an elderly, silver haired woman,” stood nearby, encouraging her son to spew his vitriol on the crowd. The middle of First Avenue was kept clear as several dozen police occupied the “no-man’s-land” between the two sides. All traffic was barred from the area.⁶

At 1:30 P.M., James Madole, dressed in a dark suit and delighted by the turnout, stepped up to the podium and launched into an attack on the nation’s Jews. Three minutes later, Jack J. Weiser, commander of the New York State Jewish War Veterans, broke through police barriers, jumped onto the podium, put his hand on Madole’s left arm, and announced he was making a citizen’s arrest “for inciting to riot against the Jewish people.” The dramatic moment came as no surprise to many in the crowd. Among them were 1,000 members of the Jewish and Catholic War Veterans who had vowed to stop Madole from speaking. The NRP leader had overestimated his support; protesting veterans far outnumbered his 500 supporters. Several weeks earlier, the two groups had circulated leaflets calling on members to attend the rally. Many veterans had traveled to Manhattan and now stood in the streets chanting, “Nazis Go Home!”⁷

As soon as Weiser put his hand on Madole’s arm, a riot broke out. Veterans, Nazis, and police clashed, while onlookers threw overripe tomatoes and rotten eggs at the Nazi cohort. As Jewish War Veterans “led a flying-wedge charge through the police barricades,” mounted police charged in to separate the sides. Even then, Nazis and war veterans continued attacking each other with fists and flagpoles. By the time the riot was quelled an hour later, nine people had been arrested and the original detail of forty-five police had increased to 120, including seven cops on horseback. At 2:30 P.M., an hour before the scheduled end, twenty police—hoping to keep the Nazis safe—escorted Madole and his storm troopers to a waiting yellow truck on Eighty-Sixth Street, where they were greeted with yet another barrage of eggs, jeers, and curses.⁸

As order was finally restored, a bruised Weiser and fellow Jewish War Veteran Jerry Cohen smiled as they saw the speaker’s podium destroyed, while the NRP’s red, white, and black Nazi banner lay tattered across First Avenue.⁹

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Police clash with Madole’s Security Echelon, May 1963 (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

In the end, both sides claimed victory. Whether in Atlanta battling with the Columbians or in New York City fighting NRP storm troopers, Jewish War Veterans had shown they would stand up to Nazis with their bodies and fists. Madole was equally delighted by the rally. He finally received the publicity he had long desired. As police escorted the Nazi cohort to their van, Abe Shoenfeld’s undercover agent “W” observed a gloating look on Madole’s face that seemed to say, “take a look at this George Rockwell & drop dead.” The next day, stories and photos about the riot appeared on the front page of the New York Times, on the evening television news, and in newspapers throughout the United States, Canada, Asia, and the Middle East.¹⁰

The worldwide publicity generated by the Yorkville riot led to an influx of new recruits and donations for the NRP. But it also prompted retaliatory measures from the government. New York state legislators introduced a resolution banning the public wearing of any National Socialist uniform or any uniform “resembling” the Nazi garb. A decade later, Madole succeeded in having the law declared unconstitutional. But in the short run, the anti-uniform law helped attract new young toughs who wanted to wear it to defy what they perceived to be the Jew-dominated government.

Madole found the combination of publicity, money, and new recruits intoxicating. As much as he hated to admit it, Rockwell had been right. Years of developing new theories of National Socialism and government programs that might appeal to Americans had gone under-reported and unknown to most citizens. But violent street action changed that. The extensive publicity he received as a result of the May street battles unleashed an angry aggressive streak that few of his men had ever seen. “The man is going mad with hate for the USA,” Shoenfeld’s reporter observed that July. Madole called on the NRP faithful “to destroy this government of liberal democracy, which is controlled by the Jews. We must have one blood. One race and one nation.”¹¹

Madole built on his initial success by staging a second set of street battles two months later. In early July 1963, James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), announced plans to picket a series of White Castle restaurants in the New York–New Jersey region until they agreed to hire more Black workers. Black and white demonstrators targeted a popular White Castle on Post Road and Allerton Avenue in the Bronx. Only four of the hamburger chain’s 126 Bronx employees were Black, and all worked as minimum wage porters. On Saturday, July 6, twenty-five Black and white CORE activists began picketing the popular hamburger joint carrying signs that read NORTH–SOUTH SEGREGATION MUST BE OUT and WHITE CASTLE IS LILY-WHITE.¹²

The demonstrations turned violent the first night as 1,000 angry white youths gathered at White Castle to mount a counterprotest. A number of young segregationists went inside to dine and taunt picketers, while hundreds of teenagers drag-raced past White Castle shouting racial epithets and throwing rocks, eggs, and tomatoes at CORE picketers. Gunshots startled protestors as Black and white opponents drove their cars past the diner firing weapons at their respective racial enemies. By midnight, forty more tactical police were brought in to augment twenty precinct cops. By the time order was restored at 2:00 A.M., nine people had been treated for cuts and bruises, while two youths were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.¹³

The attack on pickets generated front-page coverage in the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s most popular Black periodical. “Bronx is a Bomb Ready to Explode,” read the headline. A caption beneath the picture of the mob wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods and carrying Confederate flags proclaimed, “This is not Jackson, Miss! This is the Bronx, USA in NYC.”¹⁴

Seizing an opportunity to generate even more publicity, Madole and his men decided to join the White Castle counter-picketers. “We must fight on the streets for our rights,” Security Echelon head Daniel Burros urged his storm troopers. “We must drive the Negroes off the streets, before they trample all over us. We need men! American men with red blood in their veins and we will conquer this rabble.” For several nights, thirty-five of Burros’s Nazi toughs spent their evenings at the White Castle “trying to incite a riot,” but found that “the cops were too strict and ready to use their clubs.”¹⁵

Madole’s minions kept returning to the Bronx and made the front page of the New York Times (“Neo-Nazis Seized with Arms Cache in Bronx Dispute”) and New York Daily News on July 15, but not in the way they intended. The previous evening, storm troopers dressed in street clothes had passed out NRP literature to counterprotestors at the Bronx White Castle. Several hours later, after police ordered them to leave, Paul Joachim, John Corrigan, and Edward Cassidy drove to another White Castle on Soundview Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard, where they wound up on the losing end of a battle. As they tried to drive away, CORE picketers attacked Joachim’s 1958 yellow English Ford panel truck, smashing windows and damaging the vehicle.

The three infuriated storm troopers drove to the nearby Benedict Avenue police station at 4:00 A.M. and filed a complaint “that a gang of 20 Negros had assaulted them at the White Castle Diner.” Anger over their defeat in battle had clouded their senses. When the police went out to inspect the van and asked Joachim to open his trunk, they discovered an illegal arms cache that included a loaded .22 caliber revolver, a buckshot-filled steel billy club with tear gas cartridges at both ends, a crossbow and three arrows, an axe, three hunting knives, a nine-inch butcher’s knife, a switchblade knife, straight razors, a box of fish hooks, a loaded tear gas gun, and batches of antisemitic and racist literature. The three NRP men were immediately arrested on weapons charges. Several hours later, police arrested their accomplices: Dan Burros, Anthony Wells, Peter Krauss, and Ian Lehr. When authorities searched Krauss’s Queens home, they found eight rifles, a shotgun, a zip gun, nitric acid, machetes, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The most startling revelation came in the early morning hours when Lehr’s eighty-year-old father, Sydney, appeared at the police station in tears and told reporters that he was an Orthodox Jew and so was his son! When asked how a Jew could become a neo-Nazi, the heartbroken father replied: “It’s obvious they’re not right in the head—none of them. There’s nothing we could do. I warned him.”¹⁶

Ian Lehr was one of several Jews who belonged to and even held leadership positions in the NRP or Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. All hid their religious identities.

The next day, police brought Madole in for questioning and charged him and seven of his men with conspiracy to incite a riot, illegal possession of firearms, and belonging to “a subversive organization that advocates the overthrow of the Government.” Madole was held on $7,500 bail and his codefendants on $5,000 each. Prosecutors were aided by Anti-Nazi League head James Sheldon, who turned over fifteen years of spy reports. The NRP defendants were tried in a Bronx court and found guilty on charges of riot, conspiracy, unlawful assembly, and gun law violations. All received sentences of several months to two years in prison but were released on appeal—which they later won. None would ever serve serious jail time.¹⁷

Once again, Madole treated the violent incidents and subsequent arrests as a victory. Photos of the weapons cache recovered by police appeared on the front page of numerous newspapers. Rather than suffering embarrassment, Madole believed the arrests demonstrated the NRP’s toughness and willingness to embrace violence when needed. As he boasted to reporters, “Only the National Renaissance Party dares speak out against race-mixture. They call us Nazis and fascists and other names, but they can’t make us shut up.” Undeterred by their arrests, Madole and his party continued their program of street rallies, picketing, and leaflet distributions—and received more publicity than ever before.¹⁸

George Lincoln Rockwell followed James Madole’s new-found militancy with jealousy, admiration, and concern. The events of May and July had demonstrated the New York Nazi’s ability to garner publicity and new supporters. Rockwell even complimented Madole and his men for taking to the streets to fight “Jew Treason & Subversion.” Yet, fearing that the “old man” might displace him as leader of the nation’s Nazi movement, Rockwell held the first New York meeting of his American Nazi Party that June and once again called for an alliance between the ANP and NRP. Madole rejected the invitation; he did not trust the Commander or his New York agent George Lincke. Despite his public support, Rockwell told his key advisors that “Madole had accomplished nothing in 15 years and it would be nonsense to support him now.” Worse yet, Rockwell had ordered Lincke to begin secretly luring members away from the NRP and into the ranks of the ANP.¹⁹

Madole had seized the headlines and Rockwell responded with his greatest publicity stunt yet. Following the White Castle riots, the Virginia-based Nazi announced he would hold a “counter demonstration for white rights” to protest the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for an August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.²⁰

Civil Rights leaders envisioned the summer march as a culminating moment in the movement’s history. That May, while Nazis and Jewish War Veterans were clashing on the streets of New York, television cameras were capturing Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordering firemen and police to use high-pressure water hoses and attack dogs on the men, women, and children who joined King’s peaceful protest on behalf of integration. The violence unleashed against demonstrators—and shown on national television for the first time—changed American public opinion in favor of the Civil Rights campaign.²¹

Buoyed by the success of King’s recent Birmingham campaign, veteran activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin designated Wednesday, August 28, for an event they hoped would bring together a wide swath of Americans for a day of singing, praying, speeches, and promises of a better future. It would be the day King stunned the world with his “I Have a Dream” speech. For his part, King knew he needed to get as much publicity as possible. To that end, he asked his close friend, singer-actor Harry Belafonte, to organize a Hollywood contingent to participate in the March on Washington. Sixty stars, led by cochairs Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, and Burt Lancaster, attended the landmark event.²²

This was the opportunity Rockwell had long desired. The whole world would be watching, if not to see King, then to see the Hollywood movie star contingent. Madole had rallied dozens of loyalists to his side, but Rockwell promised to put “100,000 grim-jawed white men squarely in the path of that black swarm when they try to march up Capitol Hill this summer.” Unlike the National Renaissance Party, the American Nazi Party was “organized, not to produce literature, pray, write letters or talk, but to fight communism, Zionism, degeneracy, and race-mixing.” Violence was hinted at but never promised.²³

Rockwell set out to attract 100,000 supporters to his counterdemonstration by stumping through seventy-three Virginia cities urging Christian patriots—and especially Klansmen—to join him in Washington, D.C., and show the world that support for racial separation was far greater than calls for integration and civil rights. As he told an enthusiastic crowd of 500 in Roanoke that July, his party was “not out to overthrow the government, but to protect the country from Communist-inspired integrationists who plan to march on Washington.” Democrats and Republicans could not be trusted because “they are both for race-mixing and soft on communism.” To remedy that, Rockwell announced his intention to run for governor of Virginia in 1964 as a prelude to a subsequent presidential campaign.²⁴

The Navy veteran’s plans to overshadow the King demonstration met with a series of roadblocks. Two weeks before the march, Rockwell scaled back his expected turnout from 100,000 to 25,000—and then to 12,000 men and women from twenty cities who promised to join him. Even those dramatically reduced numbers of Nazis frightened authorities. Washington, D.C., police chief Robert Murray and the National Parks Service had granted five major civil rights organizations permits to hold a march that August: CORE, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Urban League, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.²⁵

The American Nazi Party generated fear far beyond its modest numbers. Despite Rockwell’s promise not to have his men wear Nazi uniforms, the National Parks Service refused his request for a parade permit, explaining that police would be too busy with the Civil Rights marchers to handle the expected chaos from the extremist group. Rockwell was furious. “If this sort of mob is ‘constitutional,’” he told reporters, “then, by God, it must be constitutional for white men to countermarch against this nigger terror, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do—teach the black revolutionists a lesson they will never forget.”²⁶

Undeterred, the Commander continued calling for supporters to defy the police, defy the march’s Black organizers, and join him in D.C. The police were not happy. After he gave an inflammatory speech in Emporia, Virginia, local authorities arrested the Nazi leader on charges of conspiring to incite the white population to violence against Blacks.²⁷

As the day of the march grew closer, Rockwell attracted a great deal of attention but not always the kind he wanted. Knowing the Nazi leader planned to march without a permit, and hoping to stem potential violence, march organizers recruited 2,000 volunteer parade marshals to deal with the threat—almost all of whom were Black and received special training in taking abuse. Police chief Murray announced he would have an additional 5,900 men at his disposal, including 1,900 regular cops and 2,000 National Guardsmen. Just in case the march turned more violent than expected, Murray had 4,000 marines and 30 helicopters stationed nearby on ready alert. None of this bothered Rockwell. “Ten thousand angry white men cannot be stopped from marching,” a defiant Rockwell told the press. Clashes with police and military forces would lead to even greater publicity for his cause.²⁸

On Wednesday morning, August 28, King’s march seized the world’s attention as more than 2,000 newspapers and radio and television stations from nearly every country turned out to cover the momentous day. The march and subsequent speeches were broadcast live via Telstar satellite to Europe. Here was the publicity opportunity of a lifetime for King and for Rockwell. It was the former who would emerge victorious, attracting over 250,000 people to the demonstration. As for Rockwell, only seventy of his followers—rather than the 12,000 who had promised to attend—showed up on the grounds of the Washington Monument at 6:00 A.M. Rockwell’s crowd was immediately encircled by 200 police and National Guardsmen who kept them isolated from the rest of the marchers. Ignoring police warning not to give any speeches, a defiant Karl Allen, Rockwell’s chief assistant, told the Nazi loyalists, “We are prepared to protest by as peaceful a means as possible the occupation of Washington by forces deadly to the welfare of our country.” Allen was immediately arrested for making a speech without a permit.²⁹

Rockwell’s counterdemonstration proved a bust. The group eventually rose to 120 supporters, but at 11:00 A.M., after five frustrating hours, the Nazi cohort dispersed and returned home. Rockwell’s hoped-for street action, the kind that generated unprecedented publicity for James Madole, never happened. Sympathizers may have enjoyed his antics but not enough to inconvenience themselves and travel to Washington, D.C. Rockwell had built an effective publicity machine but not a movement. The Nazi protest, the Washington Post reported, “was like a church picnic.”³⁰

Disgusted by the day’s events, Rockwell denounced “the cowardice of the white race—[especially] the rightwingers.” Hoping for a modicum of dignity and media coverage, the Nazi contingent left the area and marched single file across the Fourteenth Street Bridge toward their cars and then returned to ANP headquarters in Arlington. The extensive publicity he received for his failed efforts proved the only optimistic note of the day. For Rockwell, the old cliché held true: bad publicity was better than no publicity. “Rockwell Nazis ‘Kaput’ in Counter Move,” read the headline of a Washington Post article. Disheartened but not discouraged, Rockwell began planning his next move. He could not allow James Madole to best him in the publicity wars.³¹

Jesse Stoner watched Rockwell and Madole’s street actions with amusement. Both rivals thought themselves to be tough leaders. Stoner knew better. Madole and Rockwell focused on fighting street battles; Stoner focused on fighting a war. As federal authorities imposed their ideas about integration on millions of Americans who found them abhorrent, Stoner seized the opportunity to launch an aggressive and violent campaign of open resistance. He did not have to dress men up in Nazi uniforms to look tough. Instead, he intensified his strategy of winning support for White Supremacy using bullets and ballots. He would begin with bombs in Birmingham and then offer a solution to the violence by running for vice president of the United States on the NSRP ticket in 1964.

By August 1963, Stoner had established himself as the leading defense attorney, the consigliere, for all White Supremacists. He longed to be the Don Corleone of the far right, the Godfather of all nationalists, but for the moment he settled for being its Tom Hagen. The Birmingham battles presented an opportunity to become the most fearless of all nationalists.

Since the mid-1940s, Stoner had proved an extraordinary orator able to incite mobs of angry segregationists into action. He was equally adept in the courtroom. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Stoner made a career out of defending men arrested for bombing buildings or violating federal court orders. He also served as counsel for the National States Rights Party from 1958 to 1964, representing any member or Klansman accused of a major crime. And he almost always got them off.

Stoner’s courtroom success was due to several factors: his prowess as a lawyer, the prejudice of all-white Southern male juries, and a lack of convincing evidence against him or his clients. Southern authorities proved hesitant to crack down on the NSRP and the FBI was not particularly interested in investigating what they saw as state issues. It was not until after the Birmingham disturbances of 1963 that Hoover’s agents began paying closer attention to Southern violence. In the meantime, Stoner’s reputation as a man who could get clients off of almost any charge, including murder, grew stronger.

Stoner did more than just represent alleged bombers. The FBI considered him a key architect of the Southern terrorist campaign that had led to the bombing of 130 churches, synagogues, schools, homes, and racial and religious institutions between 1956 and 1963. Southern FBI agents labeled him the mastermind of the Confederate Underground and held him personally responsible for at least a dozen bombings in 1957 and 1958. As late as 1963, he was still considered a suspect in the 1958 attempted bombing of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church. Yet, despite numerous indictments, Stoner would not be convicted of a crime until 1980—which elevated his reputation among like-minded men.³²

In August 1963, as King and Rockwell were preparing for the March on Washington, a federal court ordered the desegregation of Birmingham public schools. Local board of education members responded by devising a token plan of compliance that would allow five Black students to register at three formerly all-white schools on September 3. The city was still on edge after national television cameras had captured Birmingham police turning fire hoses and dogs against King’s peaceful protestors the previous May. As television outlets and major newspapers continued covering the Birmingham disturbances, Stoner saw an opportunity to capture national attention and elevate himself beyond the likes of James Madole or George Lincoln Rockwell.

After the local school board presented its integration plan a month later, Stoner and his longtime partner in hate, Edward Fields, gave state officials a petition signed by 30,000 citizens opposing integration. The two men staged a series of open-air rallies in which they encouraged patriots to “use any and every method” to maintain segregated schools. Several weeks earlier, Stoner had spoken at an NSRP rally outside Birmingham and taught the crowd how to build a time bomb using candles as a fuse. That September, the city was rocked by a series of bombings that razed a Black church and destroyed the home of Black attorney Arthur Shores; Klansmen also took credit for tear-gassing the city’s newly integrated stores.³³

On September 4, the first day of school, Stoner and Fields led an angry mob of 150 placard-carrying protestors to Graymont Elementary School to stop two Black students from attending. Unbeknownst to the demonstrators, the two students had registered before the crowd showed up—which only heightened their anger. Protestors charged police officers stationed around the school. Following the arrest of several demonstrators, the mob moved on to block Black students from attending Ramsay and West End high schools. After throwing bricks at police, several more NSRP activists were arrested, including Stoner and Fields. A federal jury indicted them for conspiring to obstruct a court order and threatening and assaulting police officers. Prosecutors soon dropped the charges.³⁴

On September 5, Alabama governor George Wallace ordered the city schools closed until calm could return. But calm did not return. On September 15, just eighteen days after the March on Washington, a bomb went off in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church at 10:22 A.M., killing four girls—Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins—who were attending Sunday School. The blast also blinded a fifth girl, Sarah Collins, in one eye and injured twenty-two parishioners. Some sixteen to twenty sticks of dynamite had been planted outside the window near the women’s lounge.

The church had been targeted in part because its minister, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was one of the state’s most outspoken civil rights leaders. The bombing was meant to send a message to all integrationists.

Stoner was one of the principal suspects. “Invariably,” remarked local police, “that bastard [Stoner] is in the general area when a bomb goes off.” Stoner insisted the FBI had planted the bomb to discredit segregationist resistance. But FBI agents tailing Stoner had spotted him meeting with Klan leader Robert Shelton, former Klan head Asa Carter, and Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss the day before the explosion. Investigators collected evidence that placed Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Tom Blanton Jr. in a car seen near the 16th Street church in the predawn hours of September 15, waiting for another coconspirator, Bobby Cherry, to plant the explosives. But they needed more hard evidence before making any arrests.³⁵

The bombing of a church that killed four young girls once again brought national attention to Birmingham and to Stoner. Within days of the tragedy, mass demonstrations mourning the death of the girls were held throughout the country. In Washington, D.C., 10,000 Blacks and whites marched chanting “Jim Crow Must Go” and singing “We Shall Overcome.” In New York City, 13,000 people attended a memorial service; in Miami 3,000 men and women marched in a silent funeral procession; in Shreveport 1,000 people marched to honor the victims, while in Kansas City 50 CORE members sat in silence for three hours at a memorial. Demonstrations were also held in Hartford, Chicago, Omaha, Des Moines, Baltimore, St. Louis, Seattle, and Pasadena. As far as Stoner was concerned, the more publicity, the better.³⁶

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Stoner held a series of rallies on the eve of the Birmingham bombings (Getty Images)

The FBI dubbed the case “BAPBOMB” and quickly compiled a list of suspects. When they questioned Ed Fields on September 23, he denied any knowledge and filed suit against them for harassment. When G-men questioned Jerry Dutton the next day, he refused to answer questions and referred them to his attorney, Jesse Stoner, who was a prime suspect himself. Like Fields, Stoner loathed the FBI. At a recent speech in Birmingham, he had accused the Bureau of being part of the “Jewish-Communist conspiracy to take over the country,” and claimed their initials stood for the “Federal Bureau of Integration” and “feeble brained idiots.” During a rally at Mount Olive, he promised that when the NSRP came to power, all FBI agents would be tried for treason. Like Fields, he threatened to shoot any FBI agents who followed him.³⁷

Justice, especially Southern justice, often moves slowly. On September 23, a federal grand jury indicted Ed Fields and seven other men connected to NSRP on charges of obstructing the desegregation of Graymont elementary and Ramsay and West End high schools. Also indicted were their “associates,” among them Jesse B. Stoner.

The indictments made the front page of national and international newspapers and brought attention to Stoner and the National States Rights Party. Stoner, who represented himself and the indicted men, denied all charges. “The indictment is part of a Jew Communist conspiracy to destroy all white Christian patriots in America,” he told reporters. “It is a complete frameup. No one indicted is guilty.” Two days after the indictments, another bomb exploded in a Black neighborhood. Prior to the explosion, Stoner was seen meeting with George Bright, the former Columbian who had been found not guilty of blowing up Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple in 1958. On November 19, just three days before the nation paused to mourn the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, another bomb went off, shattering windows at the recently integrated University of Alabama campus.³⁸

The subsequent bombing investigations would go on for years, but defense attorney Stoner succeeded in getting the initial indictments for “conspiring against [the] U.S. government” dismissed. Although Stoner remained one of the principal suspects in the 16th Street Baptist Church explosion, J. Edgar Hoover ordered the investigation closed in 1968 without filing any charges. Three years later, when it was discovered that Hoover had suppressed evidence, Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley reopened the case. In 1977, Klansman and NSRP loyalist “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. As Chambliss later confessed, the bomb “wasn’t meant to hurt anybody. It didn’t go off when it was supposed to.” He died in prison in 1985.39

The inability to convict Stoner or any of his accomplices, combined with the massive amount of publicity the bombings received, vaulted Stoner ahead of Rockwell and Madole as the greatest warrior among American nationalists. Stoner had bested the FBI and local authorities. He succeeded in getting all his indicted warriors freed. His fame (or infamy) was never greater. But Stoner wanted more than publicity. In March 1964, delegates to the NSRP convention held in Louisville nominated militant segregationist John Kasper for president and Jesse B. Stoner for vice president of the United States; they also selected Stoner as the party’s vice chairman. Not to be outdone, George Lincoln Rockwell announced that he would run for governor of Virginia in 1964, while also exploring a potential presidential run.

James Madole was equally anxious to maximize his recent publicity by expanding his movement and once again trying to establish a partnership with Stoner and Rockwell. As a first step, Madole invited both men to join him in building a heavily armed camp in New Paltz, New York, seventy-eight miles north of Manhattan, that would serve as headquarters for all racial organizations in the United States. This time, they accepted his invitation.

PART IV

MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN

14.

Jewish Nazis, Dead Nazis, and the End of George Lincoln Rockwell

In late December 1963, James Madole persuaded a dozen representatives of the American Nazi Party, the National States Rights Party, and his National Renaissance Party to travel with him to New Paltz, New York, a small town located two hours by car north of Manhattan. Pioneering a strategy the Aryan Nations would adopt decades later, they hoped to purchase a large farm where members of all three groups could reside, accumulate an armory, and train in heavy weaponry far away from the prying eyes of government authorities. When the farm proved too expensive, a number of fascists rented more modest quarters. By February 1964, fascists had “taken over for all practical purposes” the town of New Paltz. “Their candidate for mayor just barely missed” winning, noted NRP member and secret ANL spy William “Butch” Goring. “They own and run several businesses and keep importing ANP, NRP, NSRP goons for the restaurants, machine shop, garage, etc.” The bulk of funding for the far-right enclave came from an unidentified “rich Greek manufacturer in New Paltz” who had been “importing New York City Nazis to work in his businesses for about two years.”¹

Inviting members of “all racial organizations” to join them, the group began building an army capable of beating back Blacks and Jewish communists on the inevitable day both groups would launch a war against white America. “They have buried guns, an armored car, printing presses, four airplanes, etc,” Goring observed. As the men began storing up weapons, Madole recruited ten sympathetic airmen from Stewart Air Force Base in nearby Newburgh to instruct them in “rifle practice.”²

Madole hoped to consolidate the New Paltz cadre under his leadership. The initial organizing efforts were led by longtime activist James Warner, former national secretary of the ANP and currently associate editor of the NSRP’s Thunderbolt. The Pennsylvania-born fascist had been visiting his mother in Plainfield, New Jersey, when he decided to relocate to New Paltz in December 1963. Warner opened a bookstore where he sold right-wing literature, including his own recently published pamphlet, The Real Hate Mongers: The ADL. He also distributed a book called Know Your Enemies’ Tactics, which gave precise instructions for making time fuses, hand grenades, and incendiary bombs. When the time for war came, his followers would be prepared.³

The twenty-five-year-old’s recruiting efforts stalled after he was sentenced to six months in jail in June 1964 for assaulting a local university professor with a baseball bat after he berated Warner for selling hate literature. Despite the setback, Madole remained confident that all three groups could forge an alliance that could eventually spread across the country. The events in New Paltz showed that a united front not only was possible but was already happening in New York.⁴

Stoner and Madole had been working together since August 1953. Though acting independently, they corresponded and maintained a healthy respect for one another—something rare in the right-wing world. They were happy to have their representatives work together at the Truth Seeker meetings. But none of those agents fully trusted the others, especially Rockwell’s men.

Madole, Stoner, and Edward Fields resented Rockwell. He was a newcomer to the cause who showed no deference to those who had labored in the trenches for decades. Rockwell’s charisma had propelled him ahead of his rivals on the right. He was now the best-known antisemite and racist in America, a fact that made the others jealous. Rockwell believed he was more effective, more courageous, and smarter than any other American nationalist. He was the only one who had a worldwide audience; the only one who made front-page headlines and the evening news on a regular basis. But he also had an outsized ego that brooked no real partnership; he would always have to be the Führer.

Rockwell promised to work with the other two organizations, but he and Lincke constantly attempted to undermine the NRP by stealing its members. Neither Stoner nor Madole could stand Rockwell or his proxy; however, they needed to work with him to accomplish their own hate-fueled goals, but never as his junior partner.

The threat posed by the far-right cadre in New Paltz reflected years of violent resistance against Blacks and Jews. Liberal activists persuaded Congress to pass a Civil Rights bill that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law on July 2, 1964. Passage of the act, however, sparked a new wave of militancy among those equally determined to stop what they saw as the gradual but inexorable movement toward the destruction of the white race. Over the next several years, as young Blacks frustrated with the slow pace of change began burning inner cities and calling for Black Power, Madole, Rockwell, and Stoner responded by pledging to meet Black Power with White Power, and Black violence with white violence.

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Rockwell abandons Nazi uniform for the cry of white power (Getty Images)

James Sheldon greeted the 1964 Civil Rights Act with delight and concern. The Ohio-born liberal had been an important Democratic Party activist and human rights advocate since the 1930s. His decades-long service as head of the Anti-Nazi League strengthened his commitment to civil rights for all Americans regardless of race or religion. In 1952 and 1956, he was an inner circle member of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaigns. In 1960, while serving as public relations director for the Democrats’ Nationalities Division, he helped draft the party’s civil rights platform. Sheldon rose so high in Democratic circles that Robert Kennedy appointed him chair of his senatorial campaign in 1964.5

By 1965, Sheldon saw how the gains of the Civil Rights movement were paralleled by the alarming expansion of far-right groups throughout the nation. In a July column in the American Examiner, he alerted readers to the presence of 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans. Fascists, he warned, liked to portray themselves as true patriots. The First National Directory of “Rightist” Groups, Publications and Some Individuals listed 190 groups that started with the word “American,” 91 with “Liberty,” 76 with “Christian,” 75 with “Freedom,” and 40 with “Constitution” or “Constitutional.” The directory also included 70 members of Congress and 300 foreign organizations. “If we filter out duplications and cross-listings,” Sheldon concluded, “we end up with a list of about 2,800 organizations, movements, and publications—a frightening total for any thoughtful American to contemplate.” Worse yet, the “sorry fact remains that the list has multiplied about six-fold in a decade.”⁶

Certainly, not all 2,800 organizations posed a threat to democracy or to the lives of Blacks and Jews. No one other than the most faithful expected Jesse Stoner to be elected vice president of the United States in 1964 or Rockwell to win his campaign for governor of Virginia in 1965. In their fantasies, they hoped that the racial violence sweeping American cities would lead angry white Americans to embrace the ANP, NSRP, or NRP as a viable third party.

James Sheldon, the AJC’s George Kellman, and the ADL’s Arnold Forster understood that the primary responsibility for protecting Jews and Blacks from harm lay with designated government authorities: police, sheriffs, the FBI, and the courts. But experience had taught them that those agencies could not always be trusted. Consequently, since the 1940s, Sheldon and his peers had taken preemptive action whenever they could.

Sheldon knew all about the dangerous activities in New Paltz because Butch Goring was one of several spies he had recruited to monitor and undermine Nazi and fascist groups. The information he obtained from Goring presented the ANL head with a golden opportunity to spy and divide. Sheldon still lacked the funds to place full-time operatives inside distant ANP and NSRP headquarters. The same financial limitations also limited Abe Shoenfeld’s ability to spy nationally. Fortunately, fascists and Nazis continuing attempting to forge a united front in New York City. Shoenfeld’s latest agent, “Reporter W,” attended NRP meetings and Truth Seeker Saturday gatherings on a regular basis. But he did so as an observer. Sheldon went a step further by recruiting Goring to serve as an agent provocateur. The ANL head had employed over four dozen spies since the early 1940s, and several still worked for him during the 1960s.⁷

In late 1962, as the Civil Rights bill was slowly making its way through congressional committees, the Ohio Methodist had engaged his most important agent since Emanuel Trujillo: Butch Goring, otherwise known as Agent BG. As he did with Trujillo, he asked Goring to rise to a leadership position and then subvert from within. Hopefully, he could do so without being discovered or harmed.⁸

William Lawrence “Butch” Goring was without question one of James Sheldon’s most unusual spies. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in March 1943, Goring approached the ANL head in December 1962 and offered his services as an undercover agent. What made the approach so unusual was that the nineteen-year-old was an undergraduate at Columbia University. While posing as a racist and antisemite, Goring had joined the NRP and a variety of far-right groups as part of a research project he was writing for history professor Walter Metzger. As Goring explained to Sheldon, Madole had invited him to attend NRP meetings after reading a short article on antisemitism that Goring had published in a conservative student magazine. “At these meetings,” he recounted, “I found that it was possible just from the gossip to learn a good deal more about the anti-Semitic movement than I had learned from reading. Pretending to be a racist myself, I became a member and began to ingratiate myself with other Nazi movements and to make notes of what I learned.” As a dedicated civil rights advocate and member of CORE, Goring was anxious to turn those notes over to Sheldon and help the ANL in any way he could.⁹

Convinced that Goring was not a plant, Sheldon accepted his offer and continued receiving reports from operative BG until March 1968. As in the past, he sent many of those reports to the FBI, the New York City Police, New York City Special Services, military intelligence, and trusted newspaper columnists Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson.

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Butch Goring in high school (Ancestry.com)

Madole considered it quite a coup to get a bright undergraduate from an Ivy League university to join his ranks and was delighted when Goring arranged for him to speak at Columbia University in Spring 1963. Goring became a regular participant at the weekly Thursday night meetings at Madole’s apartment on West Ninetieth Street. Also present at those meetings was Abe Shoenfeld’s “Reporter W,” who warned his boss about a “Columbia student, glasses, weak chin, curly blond hair,” who was rapidly rising in the party hierarchy.¹⁰

Shoenfeld’s operative was correct. Madole was so impressed with the intrepid undergraduate that in January 1964 he asked him to head the NRP’s Overseas Division, the same position Emmanuel Trujillo had held a decade earlier. Madole wanted him to reestablish contact with the European fascists who had abandoned the NRP after Trujillo’s exposure as a spy. “I am being groomed as a public speaker [by Madole],” a pleased Goring noted, “and will probably soon be in charge of communications with fascist and neo-Nazi groups in French speaking countries.”¹¹

Goring proved so valuable that the NRP leader invited him to join the Saturday gatherings at the Truth Seeker offices. Those meetings brought Goring into close contact with representatives from the ANP, NSRP, and several minor fascist and Nazi organizations. Within a few months, he had worked his way into the inner circle of far-right agents who trusted him with news they should have kept to themselves. Many of these men switched allegiances on a regular basis, moving back and forth between groups, often believing that they would prove far better leaders than Madole, Rockwell, or Stoner.

One of Sheldon’s greatest fears was that the Truth Seeker delegates might persuade their leaders to put aside their egos and form a powerful united organization. To prevent that from happening, Sheldon asked his latest agent provocateur to exacerbate rivalries and sow suspicion among the local nationalist agents. “Paranoia [and] secrecy,” among those men, Goring told Sheldon, “make(s) infiltration easier.” ANP, NSRP, and NRP delegates often hated each other as much as they hated Jews and Blacks. Goring heightened that hatred by telling agents their rivals were stealing members from them; he also revealed confidential information each group planned to use against the others. In short, he made a paranoid situation even more paranoid.¹²

Madole so trusted his charming Overseas Division head that he granted him access to the private correspondence he kept in his apartment. That proved a major mistake. Like Renee Fruchtbaum had done with the Columbians in 1946, Goring copied as much information as he could and sent his notes to Sheldon.¹³

In December 1963, Sheldon published an article in the American Examiner, based on Goring’s reports, describing Madole’s efforts to ally the NRP with Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and Archbishop C. C. Addison’s Black Muslims in Harlem. After reading the story, which contained information known only to those deep inside their inner circle, the Truth Seeker contingent spent a great deal of time trying to identify the spy in their midst. Madole was so incensed, especially after receiving several death threats, that he and several of his thugs paid a visit to Sheldon’s midtown offices to confront him and find out his source. Fearing the worst, Sheldon managed to duck the crew.¹⁴

Nazi and fascist agents knew the ANL, AJC, and ADL were spying on them. But no one suspected Goring. As one of his contacts complained, “I had no idea that the Ultra-Right Fascist movement was so overrun with agents, freelance infiltrators and Provocateurs.” Goring responded by fueling that paranoia. “Make no mistake about the American fascist movement. It is literally crawling with agents—Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Nazi league … (local and state police. I don’t know about the feds), Jewish groups, and freelancers.”¹⁵

To Sheldon’s delight, Goring also embedded himself inside several right-wing organizations outside New York. The Columbia history major began writing to Ku Klux Klan leaders hoping to learn more about their current and future plans. Wally Butterworth, head of the Decatur, Georgia, Defensive Legion of Registered Americans, a Klan front group, was so impressed by Goring’s knowledge of racial affairs that he asked him to establish a KKK chapter in New York. When Goring informed him that the Klan and Bund had both been outlawed by the New York State legislature, they agreed he should form a Klan front group. By January 1965, Goring had become New York organizer for that Klan front.¹⁶

For the next several years, Goring provided Sheldon with a steady stream of information about the future plans of Madole, Rockwell, and Stoner. He learned that all three men had increased their militancy but in different ways. Madole focused on expanding his regional dominance while also building a strong international presence. Rockwell continued using shock tactics to bring attention to himself—and only incidentally to his party. Stoner dedicated himself to building a strong regional movement that he hoped to expand into a national movement.

Goring also warned Sheldon of a more immediate danger posed by two of the most antisemitic warriors he had ever met. During his time attending Truth Seeker gatherings, the ANL spy became intimately acquainted with Willie Hoff Jr., Jesse Stoner’s man in New York; George Lincke and Seth Ryan, Rockwell’s agents; and two important former ANP leaders who left Rockwell and moved to New York to form the American National Party, Daniel Burros and John Patler.

The two best friends and self-proclaimed patriots spent much of their lives working together in a variety of far-right organizations. Both were born in New York, Burros in March 1937 and Patler in January 1938; both served in the military. Burros joined the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in August 1955. His racist leanings accelerated after being stationed in Little Rock during the 1957 school integration crisis. “People couldn’t even get into their own homes without going through troop lines,” Burros recounted. After watching his fellow soldiers push back young white girls with bayonets, he concluded that “America was becoming a left-wing police state.” Following a failed suicide attempt in March 1958, Burros received an honorable discharge “by reasons of unsuitability, character, and behavior disorder.” Several years later, he moved to Arlington, Virginia, to join Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. The Commander soon appointed his eager recruit as the party’s national secretary.¹⁷

Patler followed a similar path, serving in the Marines from 1958 until 1960, when he was honorably discharged after being arrested while participating in an American Nazi Party rally. Born John Christ Patsalos to antisemitic Greek parents, he joined the ANP in 1960 and changed his name to Patler to make it sound more Hitleresque. The veteran and talented cartoonist rose to become one of Rockwell’s chief captains and coedited the party’s Stormtrooper magazine with Daniel Burros.¹⁸

Rockwell admired both men and asked them to lead his Hate Bus tour in spring 1961.

Several months later, the two veterans left the ANP because they wanted it to pursue a more aggressive brand of National Socialism but without swastikas. That symbol “was good for Germany,” Patler insisted, “but the American people will NEVER accept the swastika … it is a symbol of the past.” When Rockwell refused to listen, they snuck out of the Virginia compound in the middle of the night and moved to New York, where they formed their own Nazi party spinoff—the American National Party—along with a dozen ANP defectors. “It was a difficult thing for me,” Patler confessed, “because I still loved him, although I was no longer a blind follower.”¹⁹

At the weekly Truth Seeker gatherings, Burros and Patler told Goring about the rampant dissension and numerous fistfights that often broke out among rival storm troopers in Arlington. After one particularly viciously argument, Patler, a former Golden Gloves boxer, had beat up ANP secretary Seth Ryan, now a frequent attendee at the New York gatherings. Sheldon urged Goring to exploit those cleavages without endangering himself. Patler was not a man to trifle with. Abe Shoenfeld’s agent considered him highly dangerous and warned the AJC spy chief “to be careful of that guy.”²⁰

Shoenfeld’s operative was correct. Patler was a hothead who wanted more militant action against Blacks and Jews and fewer publicity stunts that did little to advance the cause. “Rockwell is a make-believe Nazi,” Patler complained. “The only reason Rockwell is known at all is because he uses the swastika.” The American National Party was not interested in stunts but was dedicated to “saving and protecting white civilization.” Once in power, the party would pursue “the complete extermination of the niggers and other non-whites.” Even Patler’s admirers, Goring told Sheldon, feared “his extreme views [would] scare people off.” To win Patler’s trust, Goring arranged for him to speak at Columbia University, which the delighted Nazi considered quite an accomplishment.²¹

Burros was equally disgusted with the Commander. “Rockwell will do anything to advance himself a quarter of an inch,” he complained to Shoenfeld’s reporter. Despite his antisemitic rhetoric, Rockwell had inexplicably surrounded himself with a cadre of Jews. Edwin Cohen, “a Jew is Rockwell’s trusted confidant. Rockwell pays a great deal of attention to his advice; he wanted to make Cohen a member but we protested.” The Nazi leader also relied on Jewish lawyers to defend him in court, and appointed Matt Koehl, a half-Jew, to serve as the ANP’s national secretary and run its Chicago unit. He asked another Jew, Leonard Holstein, to lead his western headquarters in Glendale, California. An outraged Burros told Goring that the Commander had even proposed “making Jews members of his headquarters division” but too many Aryan members had protested.²²

For his part, Rockwell accused Patler, Burros, and men like them of being a “group of selfish malcontents, loafers, fakers, sissies, cowards, or damn fools” who were held together “by their hatred and/or jealousy of my person and the American Nazi Party.”²³

Rockwell was wrong. Burros and Patler cared less about the Nazi leader than they did about ridding the nation of its Jews. Shortly after arriving in New York, the two experienced printers and graphic artists began publishing Kill!, a rabidly antisemitic periodical “dedicated to the annihilation of the enemies of the white people.” The magazine’s first issue featured an original song, “Perish Judah!,” sung to the tune of “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” The last stanza reflected their hopes for American Jews: “Up the Chimney! Up the Chimney! Up the Chimney they Must Go! / When We have Them in the Compound, Then the Gas Will Freely Flow.” Hoping to attract a worldwide audience of fascists and Nazis, they replaced Kill! with The International Nazi Fascist—The Organ of Racial Fascism.²⁴

Burros and Patler thought well of themselves, but were smart enough to know their American National Party was too small to mount any serious national campaign. In September 1962, they abandoned their party and allied themselves with the NRP. Both men were impressed by Madole’s unceasing efforts to defeat Jewish power by forging alliances among all nationalist groups. “I don’t know if I agree with all your NRP views,” Burros told Madole, but to defeat their enemies, true nationalists needed to bury their differences and work together. A delighted Madole welcomed the former editor of the ANP’s Stormtrooper and appointed him commander of his uniformed Security Echelon. Looking to forge even more alliances, Burros defied state laws and agreed to serve as King Kleagle (chief recruiter) for the New York division of the United Klans of America.²⁵

No one hated Jews more than Daniel Burros. He accused them of “taking America over” and being behind “the destruction of the American tradition of Race separation.” He blamed Jews for leading a Civil Rights movement whose “purpose was to destroy the purity of the white race by mongrelization. They know that a nation of half-ape mongrels is more easily enslaved than a nation of proud white men.” Death was the only viable solution to the Jewish problem, a solution he openly advocated in his virulently antisemitic periodical, The Free American. Not even infamous Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, Madole boasted, “could exceed in degree the depth of righteous passion” that Burros “felt against the nefarious activities of the Jewish organizations in our midst.”²⁶

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Daniel Burros in KKK uniform (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

Butch Goring warned Sheldon that Burros was a dangerous man who needed to be watched closely. Army veteran Burros was traveling to New Paltz to help nationalists with their training. The Nazi group was being led by the NRP’s national secretary, Robert Burros (no relation to Daniel), and had recently expanded to nearby Newburgh, “a bustling community of 40,000 old-fashioned conservatives.” Both Robert Burros and Daniel Burros, Goring warned Sheldon, were determined to “create a Racial Nationalist State” that would “destroy the Jewish race” and repatriate all Blacks to Africa. “No one is sure what is going on in New Pauls [sic],” but men “were joining the American Nazi Party en masse,” a development that upset Burros and Madole. Both felt they could lead the contingent far better than Rockwell and his followers.²⁷

Sheldon was pleased. The more tensions and rivalries his agents could stir up among the NRP, ANP, and NSRP the better. A disunited fascist front was far preferrable to a united one.

Patler parted ways with Madole in May 1963 and returned to Virginia to give Rockwell one last chance. The Commander welcomed back his former disciple and appointed him editor of the Stormtrooper. Patler urged Burros to join him in Arlington, but his former partner preferred to remain in New York working with Madole and the Klan.²⁸

Madole was impressed with Burros’s skills as an artist and asked him to design flyers and handle the graphic layout for the National Renaissance Bulletin. He was equally impressed with Burros’s physical toughness. The former soldier led the Security Echelon against the Jewish and Catholic War Veterans during the Memorial Day street battles of May 1963. Yet, by January 1964, Madole had grown “unsure of Dan Burros, who continues to use swastikas, adores Rockwell, and devotes too much of his sympathies to his own causes, e.g. The International Nazi Fascist.” Madole’s suspicions were dead on. A month later, Burros announced he was quitting the NRP because Madole had proven too timid. “I prefer Rockwell,” he told his friends.²⁹

Despite his intentions to rejoin Patler in Virginia, Burros remained in New York while awaiting trial for his role in the White Castle riots. On June 9, 1964, after being found guilty of incitement to riot, Burros and Madole were sentenced to one to two years in state prison. A month later, the two men were sent to Sing Sing. Burros’s stay did not last long. On August 4, he was released on a certificate of reasonable doubt. During that time, he received encouraging letters of support from Nazis and fascists in Britain, Germany, Australia, and the United States who admired his militant International Nazi Fascist.³⁰

Burros never made it to Arlington. In early October, he went to stay with Roy Frankhouser in Reading, Pennsylvania. Like Burros, the twenty-six-year-old had been active in the Ku Klux Klan, the National States Rights Party, and other racist causes since his teen years. “Riot Roy,” as his friends dubbed him, had served as an army paratrooper for a year and then joined the ANP in 1960. When Burros contacted him, Frankhouser, a longtime Klan leader, invited him to stay at his home. He soon regretted the invitation.³¹

On October 31, 1965, the New York Times ran a front-page story that shocked the Nazi and fascist world: Daniel Burros was a Jew! After New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal had received a tip from ADL director Benjamin Epstein that Burros was Jewish, he sent reporter McCandlish Phillips to interview him. The reporter discovered that Burros’s parents were Orthodox Jews and that Daniel, a star student in Hebrew school, had been bar mitzvahed at Congregation Talmud Torah in Queens, New York. Phillips confronted the crew-cut Nazi as he left a Queens barbershop on October 29. “There’s one thing about it I can’t figure out, it doesn’t fit the picture,” he told Burros. “Your parents were married in a Jewish wedding ceremony.” How could he be a Nazi given his background? A crazed Burros warned the reporter not to publish that story. “I’ll have to retaliate, you understand? If you publish that, I’ll come and get you and kill you. I don’t care what happens. I’ll be ruined. This is all I’ve got to live for.”³²

The next day, Burros took a bus to join Frankhouser in Reading. After picking up a copy of the New York Times the morning of October 31 and seeing his story plastered across its front page, the distraught Nazi returned to Frankhouser’s home, pulled out a .32 caliber revolver, put the barrel to his chest, and pulled the trigger as he screamed, “Long live the white race! I’ve got nothing to live for!” When that failed to kill him, Burros mustered the energy to put the pistol to his head and fired a second round into his brain.³³

Burros’s death and the strange story of the Orthodox-Jew-turned-Nazi’s suicide made front-page headlines of major newspapers throughout the world. Eulogies for the dead warrior were sounded by a range of nationalist leaders. Klan members extolled Burros as a martyr and arranged a three-day cross-burning to honor him in Rising Sun, Maryland. George Lincoln Rockwell praised his former national secretary as a “brilliant young man” who spent his life “steeped in racist revolutionary causes” like the ANP and the Ku Klux Klan. “The Burros episode is but one more indication of the madness of the people known as Jews.” Burros, he added, “was the product of this unfortunate Jewish psychosis. It cost him his life.” James Madole was shocked by the suicide. “I would stake my life on Dan’s complete and dedicated sincerity.” He called his former Security Echelon leader a “completely noble patriot whose hatred for the Jews” and “intimate knowledge of their destructive effect upon western culture” had led him to “blast himself into oblivion as a final proof of his loyalty.”³⁴

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Jewish Nazi Robert Burros (in center) (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

The Nazi cause suffered a second blow four days later when the Middletown, New York, Times Herald-Record revealed that twenty-eight-year-old NRP leader Robert Burros was a Jew who had been bar mitzvahed at a Newburgh reform synagogue in 1951. Madole considered Robert Burros to be a talented “political organizer” and his exposure as a Jew marked a major setback for the Nazi contingent in the New Paltz–Newburgh area. Madole regretted that Burros had concealed his background but told the press, “As far as I’m concerned Burros is A1.” His NRP compatriots were equally sympathetic. They allowed the Jewish Nazi to retain his post as chairman of the Orange County branch but voted to remove him as the party’s national secretary. Being Jewish did not stop Robert Burros from running for state legislature on the NRP ticket in 1966.35

The revelation that Daniel Burros and Robert Burros were Jewish affected Rockwell and his party far more than he let on. Within days of Daniel’s death, Rockwell confessed there were even more Jews in the ANP. “We have some other Jews in the party, two of them. One wears the Nazi uniform in Los Angeles. But it is pretty hard to find them. All that we ask is that you be loyal to the white race.” Loyalty to the cause led Rockwell to appoint Frank Collin head of the ANP’s Midwest headquarters even though his father was a Jewish survivor of Dachau concentration camp. The nation’s leading antisemite elicited further cries of hypocrisy from his allies after discovering he had hired Jewish lawyer Mark Berger to defend him in a New York City trial for disorderly conduct. For his part, Rockwell praised his attorney and told him, “If more Jews were like you, I’d be out of business in no time.”³⁶

Rockwell suffered another disappointment that fall when Virginia voters rejected his bid for the governorship. The previous year, when he had run as a write-in candidate for president, Rockwell had received 212 votes. In the fall of 1965, he garnered 5,730 votes, 1 percent of the gubernatorial total. The only unusual note about the latter contest was news that he had received 29 votes from the eleven predominantly Black precincts in Norfolk.³⁷

The election results were to be expected. But the defection of key leaders such as Burros and Patler, along with so many of his most trusted captains and lieutenants, pointed to Rockwell’s ultimate failure as a leader. Hitler’s brownshirts had loved their führer and would have gladly died for him. Not Rockwell’s men. Many of his long-term storm troopers despised him and either left for other organizations or remained in the ANP despite the Commander. “We did not come to advance a man,” a group of twenty disgruntled storm troopers complained in December 1963, “but a cause; not to save an image, but a nation.”³⁸

Movement politics requires its participants to dedicate years, if not decades, to a cause. Few people are willing to make that kind of sacrifice and those who do expect to be treated with a modicum of respect. Rockwell’s movement never succeeded in part because he denied his subordinates even the most basic respect, much less the kind of treatment that would inspire true loyalty and commitment. Those who knew him only from afar admired him. But those who knew him personally saw a very different man: a selfish, self-centered egotist who cared little for his men and, in many ways, little for his cause.

The Nazi leader treated his men too poorly to build a serious following, let alone a viable Nazi party or army. “Rockwell’s American Nazi Party seems to be breaking up,” Goring learned from rival local agents. His supporters in New York and Virginia had grown tired of being mistreated. By early 1964, the American Jewish Committee estimated Rockwell’s full-time followers to number fewer than sixty. By March 1966, only eight men lived full-time at ANP headquarters.³⁹

Rockwell’s success was ultimately limited by his inability to create a cadre of dedicated men willing to spend years fighting for his ideas. The Virginia führer repeatedly voiced his contempt for storm troopers and supporters alike. “They’re all cowards,” he complained. “At least the liberals will fight. Most of the right wing are despicable and cowardly.” His core base, according to the FBI, consisted of “school dropouts, the failures, the misfits, the mentally ill, and the potentially violent.” Almost half of his troopers were younger than thirty years old and many had only elementary school education. “Most of my guys are ex-juvenile delinquents,” he boasted to a group of college students in February 1964, “and I’m proud of it.”⁴⁰

Those who moved to Arlington to live and work alongside the Commander were treated abysmally. They received no compensation for serving him. Their barracks, located two miles from Rockwell’s nicer two-story clapboard house, were dilapidated slums that lacked heat, adequate beds, kitchen equipment, and running water. If anything broke down, the men were expected to fix it themselves or pay for the repairs. Worse yet, despite spending their days in intense physical training—weightlifting, pull-ups, jogging, hitting punching bags—there was rarely enough food to eat. Troopers’ meals consisted of a steady diet of canned hash, oatmeal, potatoes, cornflakes, chicken noodle soup, chicken necks, corn bread, and day-old donuts. The highlight of their week was when they traveled to a local diner for a 35-cent bacon-and-egg breakfast. Even Rockwell’s dog, “Gas Chamber,” “eats better than us,” Burros complained.⁴¹

Storm troopers could forget about sex. Rockwell abhorred the idea of equal rights for women and no female was ever appointed to an ANP office. A “woman’s place is in the kitchen and the bedroom,” he insisted. To please his men, Rockwell contemplated establishing a “Naziette Branch” to be called the “Shower Troopers,” but nothing came of it. “Fascism is lonely, disreputable,” Butch Goring wrote to one friend, “if horny, go left [politically] easier to get laid.”⁴²

Extraordinarily cheap with his men, Rockwell placed no restrictions on his own needs, either for food or sex. Rather than use contributions for bail money or to improve storm troopers’ living conditions, he spent it on himself. When money was particularly scarce, his men did without. But he made sure he was fed steak and had his “secretary” Barbara von Goetz assigned sleeping quarters near his, the only female allowed to reside in the main building.⁴³

Rockwell’s personnel issues were compounded by his lack of attention to party finances. After his repeated pleas for more efficient financial management were ignored, James Warner, Rockwell’s second in command, left to form the White Party of America in April 1964 and took many of the remaining storm troopers. Rockwell’s ego had once again gotten the better of him. On December 1, 1965, IRS agents seized ANP headquarters in Arlington for nonpayment of income taxes. Forced to move, the Commander relocated to an even more run-down five-acre tract in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, where an abandoned chicken coop served as Nazi headquarters.⁴⁴

Charisma is an amazing quality. For all his flaws, Rockwell continued expanding his national reach and attracting a cadre of men willing to devote themselves to his cause. In addition to his long-standing Chicago headquarters, he opened regional branches in Glendale, California; Dallas; San Francisco, and a small cell in Philadelphia. The FBI estimated his membership at 100 in 1965, but the Commander claimed “700 hard core” storm troopers and an additional 12,000 people who sympathized and donated money. “I think there are about 10 million Americans that are mighty grateful that we are operating.” That 10 million figure was the same as Sheldon’s estimate for the total number of American nationalists.⁴⁵

Despite Rockwell’s past media success, dedicated Nazis like John Patler resented his indifference to the cause. Patler had left the ANP in 1961 because he wanted to pursue a more aggressive brand of National Socialism. He returned in 1963 hoping things would change. They did not. On January 1, 1967, after the Virginia Assembly prohibited the use of the word “Nazi” in any charter, Rockwell adopted the name National Socialist White People’s Party. At Patler’s urging, he abandoned the swastika and replaced the familiar “Sieg Heil” salute with the chant “White Power.” Patler hoped the name change would bring disgruntled white working-class men into the party. Rockwell, however, was still more concerned with stunts than with developing a coherent ideology that could attract a wide swath of voters. Catchy phrases like “The Jews Are Through in ’72,” Patler believed, were not likely to attract new members; only ideas would.

Patler left the party for good in March 1967 after criticizing Rockwell for spending scant party funds on three personal vacations. Hating being away from his wife and children, the Nazi captain left the Spotsylvania barracks and returned home to Arlington. As he packed to leave, Matt Koehl, the party’s number two leader, overheard him muttering that Rockwell was “making a big mistake” ignoring Patler’s call for change; “he’ll be sorry.” Rockwell responded by throwing Patler out of the party for gross insubordination and for promoting dissension within the ranks. Patler was offered a chance to appeal at a party court hearing in June 1967, but he refused.⁴⁶

Several months later, after the Commander had calmed down, he sent one of his longtime storm troopers to lure Patler back into the party. But Patler was finished. “Rockwell is an evil genius and he must be stopped,” he told Rockwell’s emissary. Patler believed he was the one who could save the Nazi movement from the Commander’s iron grip.⁴⁷

Rockwell always feared he would be assassinated and kept two pistols at his Arlington home. He just never suspected it would be at the hands of one of his own men. On Friday morning, August 25, 1967, the Nazi führer drove to the nearby Econ-O-Wash laundromat to wash his clothes. Having forgotten to bring bleach, he returned to his blue-and-white 1958 Chevrolet and began backing out of the parking lot when gunshots rang out. Two bullets burst through his front windshield; one passed through the front seat, but the other struck him in the heart. As his car collided with a parked vehicle, Rockwell tumbled onto the pavement, pointed to the roof of the shopping center where the shot had been fired, and then died. Forty-five minutes later, Arlington police arrested John Patler at a nearby bus stop. The sharpshooter had killed him with a 7.63mm Mauser pistol.⁴⁸

Patler was tried for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

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Rockwell shot and killed in Dominion Hills Shopping Center (Getty Images)

On Monday morning, August 28, George Lincoln Rockwell was buried at the Culpeper National Cemetery. The Defense Department allowed the former navy commander’s interment at the military site on the condition that no Nazi regalia be displayed. When his followers turned up in Nazi unforms, Major General Karl Turner canceled the funeral. Nazis and fascists throughout the world mourned the loss of a great American leader. But not Jesse Stoner. As he told one reporter, Rockwell had phoned him in 1966 “and suggested I cooperate with the FBI to get them off my back. I told him to go to hell.”⁴⁹

Rockwell was immediately succeeded by deputy commander Matt Koehl, the half-Jew who had started his career in hate working as James Madole’s head of security in 1953. But Koehl was no Rockwell and ANP membership steadily declined after he took over. Some on the far right attributed the decline to Koehl’s abrasive personality and his homosexuality, which proved embarrassing to many in the movement. From the late 1940s onward, the frequent exposure of homosexuals within the far right proved almost as embarrassing to the cause as the exposure of Jewish Nazis. So much of fascist ideology was based on notions of hypermasculinity and obedient women who sole job was to produce babies and create a warm Christian home. None of that could happen in a Nazi movement led by homosexuals.⁵⁰

With Rockwell out of the picture and the Nazi party in disarray, James Madole, Jesse Stoner, and Edward Fields saw an opportunity to expand their national reach. Unlike their dealings with the fallen Nazi leader, these three men liked one another, trusted one another, and worked well together. None saw the other as threatening his leadership. Each wished to bring the hundreds of nationalist splinter groups under their umbrella. To that end, they called for a national gathering of all racist organizations to be held in Washington, D.C., in April 1968. The far-right would finally unite under one leader.

15.

Jesse Stoner, White Power, and the New Betrayed Generation

With the death of George Lincoln Rockwell, Jesse Stoner knew his time had finally come. After his spending two decades on the road, traveling from town to town, rally to rally, urging tens of thousands of patriots to take back their country, people were finally listening to him. Despite ending most evenings by himself in a cheap motel room, Stoner found it an exhilarating if lonely life. His dream of forging a viable third party finally seemed possible.

The problem with political movements based on the cult of personality is that when the personality dies, the movement often dies with them. Former Columbian leader Emory Burke understood this all too well; he had seen his organization collapse after he was sent to jail. Knowing the struggle for White Supremacy would go on for decades, he founded the School of Racial Studies and Leadership Training in Montgomery, Alabama, in September 1962 and appointed himself as its director. His goal was to create a cadre of men who could assume leadership of the movement when the right time came. He wanted no vacuum in the struggle; no man—not Jesse Stoner, George Lincoln Rockwell, or James Madole—was greater than the cause.¹

Burke’s concern was precisely what happened to Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. The Commander’s death, observed former FBI agent and American Jewish Committee investigator Milton Ellerin, “led to the virtual dissolution of the ANP.” Rockwell’s designated successor, thirty-three-year-old Matthew Koehl, was “a dark, intense, articulate man who … lacked Rockwell’s flair, leadership, ability, and personal magnetism. Under Koehl’s reign, the already divided party virtually disintegrated.”²

The splintering of the American Nazi Party into mutually hostile spinoffs offered new opportunities for Jesse Stoner to expand his operations. While James Madole fought to control divided Nazi movement from the comforts of New York City, the far more aggressive Stoner spent the 1960s and early 1970s traveling to cities, towns, and small rural enclaves throughout the country holding meetings—some peaceful, some violent—urging citizens to resist the integrationist conspiracy to destroy the white race.³

Worried by Stoner’s rapid ascent, the ADL, AJC, and ANL continued monitoring his progress. Their agents and local observers reported how Stoner’s efforts to heighten his appeal among the “dirty-collar” crowd was aided by the Ku Klux Klan’s fracturing into eighteen rival organizations in the mid-1960s, each proclaiming itself the preeminent defender of the white race. “There were the Black Knights and the White Knights,” observed Bernard Mintz, head of the ADL’s New Orleans office, “Purple Knights and the Knights of This and the Knights of That. They each wanted to be the head macher [leader]. They never had any unified action.”⁴

Stoner’s ability to learn from past mistakes made him an increasingly effective leader. Since the mid-1940s, he had relied on appeals to racism and antisemitism to draw Southerners to his parties, first the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party and then the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. Neither had achieved the kind of success he had envisioned. Determined to evolve from a regional activist to a national leader, he had helped found the National States Rights Party (NSRP) in 1958. But a party founded largely on racism and antisemitism was not enough to attract voters outside the Deep South. He needed ideas that would appeal to a broad constituency. As he watched the country’s demographics change over the next decade, Stoner changed his political strategy.

By the mid-1960s, Stoner knew that race and integration were no longer Southern problems but issues of national consequence. He watched as over 1.5 million Black men and women left the South between 1940 and 1950, searching for a better life. By 1959, more than 40 percent of the nation’s 18 million Blacks lived north of the Mason-Dixon line.⁵

As Blacks continued migrating across the country, Stoner used militant appeals to racial consciousness to help the NSRP achieve greater national recognition. By 1970, 50 percent of the nation’s Black population lived outside the Deep South. Chicago’s Black population was larger than that of Atlanta, Birmingham, Houston, and Memphis combined, while New York City had more Black residents than New Orleans. Black families also composed nearly 5 percent of the country’s suburban population. Whether in cities or suburbs, new minority arrivals often competed with whites for jobs and housing—developments that sparked anger and violence. Worse yet, as far as Stoner and his ilk were concerned, the nonwhite population was growing at a faster rate than the white population—a demographic trend that threatened the very survival of white America.⁶

Stoner also warned of the dangers presented by the continued growth of the nation’s Jewish population. From his early days as a Klan organizer in 1944 through the 1960s, his message remained constant: Jews and Blacks were destroying the fabric of American life and Western civilization. Sounding his lifelong appeal to Christian Identity, he warned that Judaism was “Satan’s religion” and that Satan’s forces included both “his children, the Jews” and “the black beasts.” Those forces were now expanding at a rate that endangered white Christian civilization. By 1970, the United States was home to six million Jews, the largest concentration of Jews in the world—more than two and a half times the number in Israel.⁷

While George Lincoln Rockwell had used stunts to achieve greater personal publicity, the energetic Stoner traveled the country building a grassroots mass movement that drew on the tenets of Christian Identity. The fortyish lifelong bachelor claimed he was accompanied on his latest recruitment campaign by Jesus—that is, Jesus as taught by Stoner and his latest ally, the Reverend Charles Conley “Connie” Lynch. Born to a poor Texas cotton-farming family in November 1912, Lynch, like Stoner, considered himself a champion of the poorest of the white working class. During the Great Depression, he migrated to southern California in search of employment. After serving in the U.S. Army for two years, Lynch began preaching in a series of Christian Identity churches.⁸

Stoner considered Lynch to be a close ally who shared several critical values: a sociopathic hatred of Jews and Blacks, a determination to use violence to achieve their goals, and a firm belief that Christ was guiding their actions. Both men were deeply influenced by the charismatic Dr. Wesley Swift, the former Ku Klux Klan weapons instructor who had founded the Los Angeles–based Church of Jesus Christ–Christian in 1946. Swift’s Christian Identity movement merged appeals to White Supremacy with a long tradition of Christian antisemitism. He preached that European Anglo-Saxons, not Jews, were God’s Chosen People. Jews were the Devil’s children, the illicit spawn of Satan and Eve. Jews were trying to eliminate the Aryan race through economic enslavement, colored immigration, and miscegenation. As for Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and people of color, Christian Identity taught that they were not fully human but were “mud” people. To kill a Jew or minority, then, was not the same as killing a fully human being.⁹

Stoner admired Swift and relied upon his teachings throughout his life. “The Jews hate our Lord Jesus Christ, our Race and our Nation,” he and his party repeatedly warned. “That is why we know that to be Anti-Jewish is a leading Christian virtue and an essential White American virtue.” Stoner was delighted when Swift joined the NSRP at its inaugural convention in 1958 and granted it God’s approval. Four years later, Connie Lynch, a Swift disciple, agreed to serve as the party’s state organizer for California.¹⁰

Stoner needed help to expand his movement and Connie Lynch was precisely the kind of fiery speaker who could advance his cause. Since his early days as Tennessee’s youngest Klan Kleagle (chief recruiter), Stoner had been a loner, traveling the road and talking to crowds by himself. The only man he trusted was Edward Fields, whom he had known since the then fourteen-year-old joined the Columbians. But Fields was not a road warrior. Married and with children, he spent most of his time at home, editing the NSRP’s newspaper, Thunderbolt.

No ordinary minister, Connie Lynch proved to be a great stump speaker and rabble-rouser able to incite people to action. “He would whisper, scream, bellow, rave, turn red, and even slobber occasionally.” Lynch drew the kind of large crowds the NSRP needed to advance its cause. Stoner knew the two of them on the road together would prove a powerful force. Lynch, recognizing his friend’s outsized ego, was happy to let him serve as the senior partner, while he concentrated on inciting folks to violence.¹¹

Like Rockwell, both men understood the power of “branding.” Throughout his life, Stoner was known for his pronounced limp, close-cropped hair, white shirt, bow ties, and a three by five-inch Confederate flag that he always wore in his jacket or shirt pocket. Lynch proved even more flamboyant. In addition to his signature vest made from a Confederate flag, he toured the country in a 1958 pink Cadillac that drew the attention and admiration of crowds that came to hear the once-poor boy’s message. Not to be outdone, Stoner traded in his used car for a black Lincoln Continental with Confederate flags attached to its bumpers.

The message both men preached was one of violence and redemption. Only when Blacks and Jews had been put in their place would hard-working Christians have a chance to earn a decent living and live in decent housing. Over the next decade, the two friends traveled the road together, urging white patriots to protect their country from the Jewish–Black menace. If violence was needed, so be it. The NSRP “ain’t no peaceful organization,” Lynch told a crowd in St. Augustine, Florida. “I believe in violence, all the violence it takes whether to scare the Niggers out of the country or to have ’em all six feet under … If you have to fight and shed blood, theirs or yours, do it … I’m speaking for God. And you’d better listen.” Lynch was proud of the battle scars he had received during fights with the Black enemy: a one-inch scar on his outer chin, and a large burn scar on his inner left arm and the entire left side of his body.¹²

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Connie Lynch in signature Confederate flag vest (Florida Memory Project)

The NSRP was unlike any mainstream party. Arguing that violence was “God’s will,” Lynch often incited listeners to action. At a rally in Anniston, Alabama, he told attendees, “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white man’s streets and to protect our constitutional rights, I say ‘Yes, kill them!’” Several hours later, Hubert Strange, who had attended the rally, went out and murdered a Black man, Willie Brewster Sr. Likewise, after Lynch exhorted a Baltimore crowd to launch a race riot, hundreds of white youths roamed through the city streets terrorizing Black residents and beating up anyone who got in their way.¹³

[picture]

Jesse B. Stoner in signature bow tie and Confederate flag (Getty Images)

This was not politics as usual—which was precisely what Stoner offered voters. He promised vengeance. “When the NSRP eventually wins political power, we will prosecute, imprison and execute all of those devils who persecuted us and worked with the Communist–Jewish conspiracy to destroy our religion, our race and our nation.” Stoner often carried a gun and vowed to shoot any FBI agents who conducted surveillance on him or his party.¹⁴

Government officials took Stoner’s threats seriously. A California Senate Fact-Finding Committee concluded the NSRP “is, in our opinion, more potentially dangerous than any of the American Nazi groups, as it is interested in activities that are far more vigorous and direct than the picketing that has become so popular in this country during the past few years.” The FBI labeled Stoner’s party “a potential source of danger to our democratic, law-abiding society. Its propaganda and public activities are all geared to rousing the passions of avowed racists and hatemongers. And in some instances, at least, it has been successful.”¹⁵

Stoner envisioned himself as the leader of a national party dedicated to segregation, antisemitism, and white purity. When the Tennessee-born racist ran for vice president of the United States on the NSRP ticket in 1964 along with presidential candidate John Kasper, he appeared on the ballot in only three states—Arkansas, Montana, and Kentucky—and garnered a mere 6,980 votes. That same year, Alabama governor and arch segregationist George Wallace lost his bid to secure the Democratic nomination for president, but his growing appeal suggested hope for the future. Running in only three primaries before he withdrew from the race, Wallace, the “white man’s candidate,” received sizeable support outside the Deep South: 45 percent of the primary vote in Maryland, 32 percent in Indiana, and 25 percent in Wisconsin.¹⁶

With the death of Rockwell, Stoner believed he could be the national leader of the far-right, but to do so he needed to bring the NSRP and its message to men and women north of the Mason–Dixon line. As Blacks and Jews spread throughout the United States, so, too, did Stoner’s party. By the mid-1960s, the NSRP included an estimated 100,000 members with chapters in thirty-eight states and cities, including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.¹⁷

As the nation’s evangelical movement grew stronger in the mid-1960s, Stoner and Lynch found enthusiastic support among far-right Christians throughout the Northeast and Far West, especially in California and Oregon. Stoner’s successful western speaking tour attracted crowds in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Spokane, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and Vancouver, Canada. The once regional party turned national and established “Elite Guard” units in Georgia, Arkansas, California, Montana, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Washington state.¹⁸

This was a start, but Stoner knew his party needed to expand its national base even further if it wished to win high office. He believed that all he needed was a lucky break—and he soon got one.

When an off-duty New York City policeman shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-year-old Black Harlem resident who allegedly had threatened him with a knife, it set off six consecutive nights of rioting in July 1964. Continued clashes with police left one dead, 118 injured, and 465 arrested. And that was just the beginning. Black anger over the slow pace of progress led to widespread urban rioting every summer from 1964 through 1968. By 1966, much to Stoner’s delight, racial violence was more widespread and turbulent in the North than in the South. That summer deadly riots erupted in Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, Minneapolis, Omaha, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Waukegan, Illinois. Black riots often sparked counter-riots by whites. “Those participating in the violence,” observed one AJC official, “were mostly low-income workers living near Negro neighborhoods” who were led by men of Catholic, Irish, Italian, and Polish origins.¹⁹

During the hot summer of 1967, racial violence rocked over 100 cities, leaving 85 dead, 3,200 injured, 16,000 arrested, and property damage of over $550 million. Stoner watched with glee as the long-standing Black-Jewish alliance began to unravel as rioters looted and damaged hundreds of neighborhood stores, many of which were owned by Jews. In Philadelphia, an estimated 80 percent of the wrecked and looted businesses belonged to Jews.²⁰

The attack on Jewish stores was accompanied by a sharp spike in antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence. By May 1967, Jewish communities across the United States had reported experiencing “increasing hostility” from extremists on the left and right. “More than 35 million Americans,” the AJC reported, “still retained anti-Jewish attitudes.” White and Black hooligans desecrated Jewish cemeteries, painted swastikas on synagogues, bombed Jewish homes, and beat up Jews on city streets.²¹

Black antisemitism grew greater as militant civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began expelling all whites from their ranks. Jews came in for special attacks during the Six-Day Israeli–Arab War of 1967. The SNCC Newsletter of June–July 1967 blasted Jews for “imitating their Nazi oppressors.” SNCC was not against the Jews per se, “only Jewish oppressors” in Israel and “in the little Jew shops in the ghettos.” It was “ironical and sad,” noted one Jewish leader, “that this outrageous attack is of a piece with a similar attack in the current issue of Thunderbolt, the official organ of the racist National States Rights Party.”²²

Mainstream Black leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph criticized SNCC for engaging in “history’s oldest and most shameful witch-hunt, antisemitism.” The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. denounced SNCC’s statement, arguing that antisemitism “is used to divide Negro and Jew, who have effectively collaborated in the struggle for justice.” It would be “impossible to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negroes’ struggle for freedom,” King added, “it has been so great.”²³

King was correct in his assessment. During the 1960s, half the civil rights attorneys and more than half the white Freedom Riders in the South were Jews; and much of the funding for the NAACP, CORE, and other civil rights groups came from Jews. But that did not matter to a new generation of young Black radicals who wanted to fight on their own, without white assistance.²⁴

Years of racial rioting, a fractured Jewish–Black alliance, and George Wallace’s renewed campaign for the presidency convinced Stoner and many far-right activists that Americans were finally ready to listen to them. In March 1968, Harvard-educated Karl Allen, who formed the White Party in April 1964, called on all white nationalists to gather in Washington, D.C., on April 20 and 21, 1968, for the first annual Assembly of Racist Movements. Their goal was to “consolidate the forces of the various right wing groups throughout the country in order to fight the Jewish and Negro problem [that] exists in the country today.” This was precisely what Jewish leaders had feared since May 1945: that a divided right would finally set aside their differences and forge a powerful national alliance.²⁵

Jesse Stoner envisioned himself as the man on the white horse who would lead a vibrant segregationist party to success. But Allen was not ready to turn over leadership to any single group or leader. Rockwell’s former deputy commander had seen how past efforts to join Nazis, fascists, and White Supremacists in a single alliance had failed. No group or leader wanted to be subservient to another. Having learned from past mistakes, Allen’s Assembly of Racist Movements promised to forge a confederacy of equals. Each group would continue operating independently but agreed to “codify a common political approach, develop methods and techniques for electing white racist officials, and establish channels for cooperation among the groups represented.”²⁶

Stoner was too busy traveling the country to attend, but he told his friend James Madole that his party would cooperate with the NRP and the D.C. alliance. Madole had been calling for a “Racial Nationalist State” since the mid-1960s and told Allen that he and his men would attend and pass on the results to Stoner. Never short of ego, the NSRP leader remained confident he could take over any organization that might emerge.²⁷

Madole, Allen, and the delegates attending the Washington, D.C., assembly left believing they could work together to advance their common cause. But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 had limited the success of their tentative alliance while simultaneously advancing Stoner’s prominence. On March 29, 1968, the civil rights leader had arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, to lend support to striking Black sanitation workers. Six days later, James Earl Ray used a high-powered Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle to kill King while he stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Ray fled to Toronto in his white Mustang and then to London, leaving behind a rifle and binoculars that contained his fingerprints. The assassin was arrested in June at London’s Heathrow Airport as he attempted to flee to Rhodesia or South Africa, two countries that welcomed White Supremacists.

King’s death shocked the nation and was followed by fifty-four days of rioting in 125 cities that left 43 dead, 2,600 injured, and over 20,000 arrested. While most Americans mourned his loss and the subsequent assassination of Robert Kennedy in early June, the double tragedy brought joy to the far right and unprecedented attention to Jesse B. Stoner. The FBI initially suspected Stoner of the shooting. They knew that ten years earlier, Klan leader William Morris had offered him $25,000 to hire a sniper to kill King. Stoner had refused. Bureau agents only began looking for other suspects after confirming that Stoner had spoken at a rally in Meridian, Mississippi, the day of the assassination.²⁸

Following Ray’s arrest, Stoner offered his legal services and money from his “Patriotic Legal Fund.” The assassin declined and chose former Birmingham mayor and perennial Klan legal defender Arthur Hanes Sr. as his attorney. Ray did, however, invite Stoner to visit him in jail. That September, Stoner spent ninety minutes in Shelby County Jail talking with Ray about joining his defense team. When Hanes learned about the meeting, he told reporters, “I would not allow that man Stoner to be associated in any case that I am involved in.” He need not have worried. On November 10, two days before his trial, Ray replaced Hanes with famed defense attorney Percy Foreman, who had represented 1,500 accused murderers and won acquittals for 1,439 of them. But not for Ray.²⁹

On March 10, 1969, James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. Three days later, Ray recanted his confession and fired Foreman, arguing the attorney had coerced him into pleading guilty. He hired Jesse Stoner and two other attorneys to file an appeal for a new trial. Stoner also began preparing libel suits against news publishers whose reporting, he insisted, had prevented his client from receiving a fair trial. Stoner failed on both counts. On May 26, 1969, Judge Arthur Farquin Jr. ruled that Ray had entered a guilty plea in good faith, thereby precluding the right to a retrial. Stoner continued representing Ray into the early 1970s, but with little luck. King’s assassin insisted he was innocent until the day he died of a hepatitis C infection in April 1998.30

Despite losing the case, Stoner benefited from publicity surrounding his involvement. “I am sure when History is written,” remarked Jerry Ray, “my brother James Earl Ray will be a Hero alongside of J. B. Stoner.”³¹

Far-right activists were more optimistic than they had been in years. Their greatest enemy, Martin Luther King Jr., was dead. White Supremacists were further encouraged by George Wallace’s independent run for the presidency in 1968. The man who had boldly called for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” during his gubernatorial inauguration in 1963 received nearly ten million votes (13.5 percent of the total) running on the American Independent Party ticket. Wallace captured five Southern states and significant support from working-class voters in the North and Midwest.³²

Wallace’s surprisingly strong showing and Stoner’s turn on the national media stage convinced the latter the time was ripe for another run for high office. But first, he traveled to Europe in December 1969 to raise money for Ray’s defense and to forge an international alliance between the NSRP and “all White nations, in view of the world-wide survival crisis the White Man faces.” Over the course of a hectic month, he met with fascists and ultranationalists in four countries and created ties with like-minded organizations in half a dozen nations.³³

In May 1970, Stoner announced he was entering the Democratic race for governor of Georgia and that Jerry Ray would serve as his campaign manager. Age did little to temper Stoner’s extremism. “I am not a conservative; I am not a liberal; I am a white racist.” Referring to himself as the “candidate of love,” Stoner gushed, “I love white people and white children.” Invoking Christian Identity theology, the love candidate called Blacks a subhuman “branch of the ape family” bent on destroying whites by “pumping the jungle blood of Africa into the bloodstream of the white race.” Likewise, Jews were the “enemies of God,” and he regretted that Hitler had been “too moderate” with them.³⁴

Stoner toured the state delivering fiery speeches from the back of a flatbed truck that had the NSRP’s thunderbolt symbol painted across a Confederate flag. He was often greeted by children dressed in KKK costumes and men “with whiskey on their breaths and loaded guns at their side.” They listened as Stoner vowed to cut welfare for Blacks, end school busing, and impose strict segregation. Under his administration, no Black man or woman would be hired for any state job, White students in private school would be given tuition grants, and prayers would be restored in all classrooms. He would make America a Christian nation once again.³⁵

Stoner’s most enticing pledge was the same he had been making his entire adult life. If elected he would expel all Jews from the state (and hopefully the country), confiscate their ill-gotten wealth, and distribute it among Georgia’s white Christians. A store manager in Savannah told a reporter he knew Stoner’s remarks were designed for “shock” and “free” publicity but added that he “says what about 85 percent of the people think. They don’t hate that much, but they do feel that way.”³⁶

Despite strong support from the Ku Klux Klan, Stoner finished a distant fourth in the Democratic primary. A relatively unknown Navy veteran and peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, won the election, polling 388,280 votes (49 percent) to Stoner’s 17,663 (2.2 percent).

Far from being discouraged, Stoner set out to expand his base of voters. The question he faced was how to use King’s assassination and his own recent fame to tap into white anger. His subsequent political prospects turned on two developments: the emergence of heavily armed militant groups that made the NSRP appear “moderate,” and the rise of a new Betrayed Generation that felt ignored by their government.

White Supremacists admired Jesse Stoner’s lifelong defense of their cause, but many thought his political ambitions had made him too soft. Influenced by the preaching of Wesley Swift, heavily armed militant extremists on the far right organized a network of antigovernment militia units that would counter Black Power with White Power. Having lost faith in both parties, their preferred weapon was the bullet.

During the early 1960s, retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel–turned–Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale helped Swift launch the California Rangers, a paramilitary group the state’s Department of Justice labeled “a secret underground guerrilla force.” Gale, whose Jewish father converted to Christianity, had served on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff during World War II, organizing guerrilla forces in the Philippines. After leaving the army with a “medical history of psychoneurosis,” he became a minister in Swift’s rapidly growing church empire. Pledging to save Christians from the “undesirables” who had corrupted the American government, its citizens, and their dreams, Gale set out to recruit 20,000 men—especially military veterans—who would not hesitate to kill “leaders of our country” to save the nation.³⁷

FBI agents considered the Rangers “armed and dangerous.” Members were encouraged to train in urban combat and prepare to take to the nation’s streets within six hours of Jews launching their plot “to overthrow the Government.” Rejecting both mainstream parties, the Rangers maintained “intimate connections” with the National States Rights Party, as well as the KKK and Swift’s church. If any Ranger were to vote in an election, it would be for Stoner or one of his preferred candidates.³⁸

Gale’s Rangers were soon absorbed by the more violent Minutemen. Organized by Army veteran Robert Bolivar DePugh, members believed a “pro-American government could no longer be established by peaceful political means.” Since World War II, patriots had been repeatedly denied the opportunity “to vote for a real American.” Instead, they were forced “to vote for whoever they thought might be the lesser of two evils.” Laying out a justification that would be used by militia groups for decades to come, the Minutemen’s founders declared, “When our constitutional government is threatened we are morally justified in resorting to violence to discourage communists and their fellow travelers.”³⁹

Inspired by Christ and a deep sense of patriotism, the Minutemen movement spread across the country. When New York authorities arrested nineteen Minutemen in October 1966 who were planning to bomb three summer camps allegedly being used by “Communist, left-wing, and liberal[s],” they uncovered an array of rifles, pipe bombs, mortars, machine guns, grenade launchers, and a bazooka. A similar raid at the Los Angeles–based Erquiaga Arms Company yielded 370 machine guns and silencers they were selling to Minutemen like Terrel R. Eddy, the NSRP’s California chair.⁴⁰

During the remainder of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first century, heavily armed antigovernment “patriotic” Christian groups such as the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations, and White Aryan Resistance mushroomed throughout the country, rejecting mainstream politics and government authority in favor of armed confrontation. Like the much beloved Wesley Swift, Aryan Nations founder and Christian Identity minister Richard Butler insisted that God had given them “divine permission to hate” and to kill.⁴¹

The rise of heavily armed military groups that challenged the very legitimacy of the American government made Stoner’s pledge to stay within the boundaries of electoral politics appear far more reasonable than in the past. This moderation helped but was not enough to propel him into office. What changed his prospects was the rise of a new generation of disgruntled young Americans who believed Blacks, Hispanics, and minorities were getting too much from the government and hard-working whites too little. Stoner knew these men and women, just as he had known their parents and grandparents. From this new generation rose the Betrayed Americans, many of whom had served in Vietnam. Like their counterparts in World War II, these veterans returned home feeling alienated from their government and both parties. They were being deprived of a chance to achieve their vision of the American Dream: a good job, a good home, and a safe neighborhood in which children could grow up and prosper. If Stoner could tap into their anger, he stood a chance of being elected by his beloved “dirty-collar crowd.”⁴²

By 1968, politicians, academics, and journalists were discussing what Stoner already knew. The nation’s white working class, the people Republican presidential hopeful Richard Nixon called “the Silent Majority,” were angry and wanted candidates willing to fight for their interests. What pundits and thinkers discovered was not encouraging—unless you were Jesse Stoner. Blue-collar Americans found themselves competing with Blacks for jobs and housing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1962 and 1967, Black workers entered skilled positions at approximately four times the rate of white workers and their earnings rose from 61 percent to 68 percent of the white median income.⁴³

The growth of white anger and armed militias led the American Jewish Committee to label 1969 the year the “white ‘counter-revolution’ surfaced officially.” The “average American,” concluded a special Newsweek report, “is more deeply troubled about his country’s future than at any time since the Great Depression.” A “futile war abroad and a malignant racial attitude at home; un-nerving inflation and scarifying crime rates; the implacable hostility of much of the young,” all had led many disillusioned citizens to wonder “whether a rewarding middle class life is still possible in modern America.”⁴⁴

Stoner understood the roots of white discontent, but many Americans did not. New York City’s famed blue-collar journalist Pete Hamill explained the economic causes that had sparked the rise of the new Betrayed Generation. The “working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and joint memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream … any politician who leaves that white man out of the political equation does so at very large risk.” As congressman and future New York governor Hugh Carey added, the “white man who makes $7,000 a year, who is 40, knows that he is never going to earn much more than that for the rest of his life, and he sees things getting worse, more hopeless.”⁴⁵

The cry of White Power grew increasingly louder in the wake of Black riots, forced busing, and a spate of fair-housing laws that made it easier for Blacks to gain access to affordable accommodations. A 1969 Gallup poll of white Americans with incomes between $5,000 and $15,000 found that 50 percent of respondents believed the United States had changed for the worse during the past decade and would get worse in coming decades; 85 percent thought Black militants and college demonstrators were treated too leniently; and 44 percent were convinced that “Negroes have a better chance than people like you to get well-paying jobs.” Veterans retuning from Vietnam were equally upset by a lack of government concern for their well-being.⁴⁶

The turning point in Stoner’s political evolution—and the evolution of the ultraright—came in the mid-1960s when he adopted a critical lesson he learned from George Lincoln Rockwell. In 1960, the American Nazi Party had been even more marginal than the NSRP. Rockwell’s movement had achieved a new level of success after he shifted away from Nazi and antisemitic rhetoric in favor of a new battle cry of White Power.

On July 30, 1966, as Martin Luther King Jr. led 700 demonstrators on a march through Chicago’s white working-class neighborhoods demanding affordable housing for Blacks, they were met by a large mob of white men who hurled rocks and bottles, used icepicks and razors to slash tires, and set cars on fire. After being hit in the head by a brick, King told one reporter, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen any so hostile and so hateful as I have seen here today.”⁴⁷

Seizing on a golden opportunity for national publicity, Rockwell drove sixteen hours from Arlington, Virginia, to Chicago in late August and spoke to a crowd of 2,000 angry working-class whites who were determined to keep the Black horde from invading their neighborhoods. “These black people that now want opportunities, equal this and equal that, and want to live in this house and that house,” he warned, now wanted to “move into your neighborhood.” He promised to stop that from happening. Ending the rally with a call and response session, Rockwell yelled, “WHITE” and the crowd responded, “POWER,” and they did it repeatedly. As he stepped down from the podium and shook hands with the adoring crowd, Rockwell found himself moved to tears. Over the next several weeks, he organized White Power rallies that led to multiple speaking invitations and a new cadre of admirers.⁴⁸

After observing the unprecedented support Rockwell received, Stoner pivoted to the cry of White Power. American antisemitism was simply not widespread enough to generate a mass political movement, but naked appeals to racism and white supremacy might do that. The demand for White Power attracted people with little interest in Jews, Nazis, the American Nazi party, or the NSRP. As an angry Milwaukee Slavic worker told Newsweek, Americans “think they’ve heard from black power, wait till they hear from white power.”⁴⁹

Capitalizing on that realization. Stoner ramped up his racist appeals and downplayed his antisemitic rhetoric. He knew what these angry men and women wanted, and he was willing to say what many politicians would not. They did not want their children bused to Black schools; they did not want their daughters to socialize with Blacks; and most of all, they did not want Black families moving into their neighborhoods and competing for housing and jobs. An opinion poll in 1972 found that 53 percent of Georgia voters believed “public officials don’t care what people want.” Many Southerners had always felt this way, but now, as the Black population spread across the nation, those ideas were increasingly embraced in the North.⁵⁰

Confident he could attract this new generation of disgruntled working-class voters, Stoner decided to run for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat in the 1972 Democratic primaries. His chances of success were greatly enhanced by a major political realignment that year. The long-standing New Deal coalition of Southern whites, Jews, ethnics, blue-collar workers, and liberals was shattered as many Democrats rejected George McGovern and helped Republican incumbents Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew achieve a landslide victory. Staunch working-class Democrats like baker Benjamin Ross and his wife, Esther (the author’s parents), voted Republican for the first time in their lives because they considered McGovern too radical. Pollsters found that voters earning less than $7,000, “the traditional bulwark of Democratic strength,” gave Nixon 42 percent of their votes, a sharp increase over his 1968 total. The Republican president carried all eleven Southern states and many of the nation’s suburbs, rural areas, and formerly liberal cities.⁵¹

As he prepared for yet another grueling campaign, forty-seven-year-old Stoner finally allowed himself a few luxuries. Instead of spending nights on the road in cheap motels or sharing an apartment with old friends, Stoner moved NSRP headquarters from Savannah to a nice suburban home in more centrally located Marietta, Georgia. The front wall of the two-story red brick house was plastered with a large NSRP sign, while a huge Confederate flag flew from the second story. In a rare moment of indulgence, Stoner traded in his black Lincoln Continental for a baby-blue Cadillac and hired Jerry Ray as his chauffeur and bodyguard.

Hard-core supporters hoped he would run on an NSRP ticket, but Stoner knew he stood a better chance running as a segregationist Democrat. George Wallace’s relative success in 1968 and his even more promising Democratic presidential run in 1972 had convinced unrepentant racists like Stoner that there was substantial support for their ideas. Wallace entered the race on January 13, 1972, and surprised party leaders by mounting a strong campaign based on opposition to busing and integration. The former Alabama governor shocked the political establishment by doing far better in the primaries than anyone had anticipated—until he was shot five times on May 15 by Arthur Bremer, a janitor from Milwaukee. The shots left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down and effectively ended his campaign and political career. He withdrew from the contest two months later.

The attempted assassination left many on the right wondering what might have happened if a healthy Wallace had remained in the race. The day after the shooting, he won primaries in Florida and Michigan. Even without campaigning, Wallace went on to win primaries in Tennessee (with 68 percent of the vote), North Carolina (50 percent), and Maryland (39 percent). Wallace also found strong support outside the Deep South, finishing second in Indiana, West Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.⁵²

Addressing the Democratic National Convention from his wheelchair that July, Wallace predicted the party would lose the general election unless it endorsed his call for a constitutional amendment to ban busing. Voters, he insisted, are “against the senseless, asinine busing of little schoolchildren.” His prediction came true.⁵³

With Wallace out of the way, Stoner believed he could emerge as the nation’s leading segregationist. His Senate campaign strategy combined lessons he had learned from the Columbians and George Lincoln Rockwell. He had watched Emory Burke build his Columbian following around one issue: stop Blacks from taking away jobs and affordable housing. Stoner urged Georgians to “Vote for the White People’s Candidate.” His platform called for the repeal of all civil rights legislation and the forcible repatriation of Blacks to Africa. He used Christian Identity to appeal to the thirty million politically active evangelicals who had thrown their support to Richard Nixon.⁵⁴

Like Rockwell, Stoner relied on television to bring further attention to himself and his ideas. The Senate hopeful generated his greatest publicity with one of the most racist ads ever to appear on TV. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and bow tie, with his Confederate flag tucked into his breast pocket, Stoner stared directly at the camera and told the audience, “I am the only candidate for the U.S. Senate who is for white people.” He called for the repeal of civil rights laws that “take jobs from us whites and gives those jobs to the niggers. The main reason why niggers want integration is because the niggers want our white women. I am for law and order with the knowledge that you can’t have law and order and niggers too … This time vote your convictions by voting white racist J. B. Stoner into the run-off election for United States Senator.”⁵⁵

The NAACP and ADL filed petitions with the Federal Communications Commission claiming Stoner’s ad constituted a “clear and present danger because likely to incite racial violence.” Citing free speech guarantees of the First Amendment, the FCC reluctantly approved the ad.⁵⁶

Stoner’s sixty-second television spots played twenty-one times on Atlanta’s WSB-TV and nearly 100 times in cities and towns throughout Georgia. “In just two years,” Stoner promised supporters, “we’re going to be running campaigns like this in all parts of the country.”⁵⁷

On August 9, Georgia’s Democratic voters went to the polls and elected Sam Nunn as their Senate candidate. No liberal, Nunn criticized the party’s presidential nominee, George McGovern, and suggested he might cast a write-in vote for George Wallace. Jesse Stoner finished fifth in the primary but won 40,675 votes, the largest number of his career thus far. Stuart Lewengrub, the ADL’s s Southeastern regional director, expressed “wonderment at the kind of fear and sickness which must grip the minds of those who would vote for Stoner. Here is a man who has stated that ‘Hitler was too moderate.’ Here is a man who has endorsed the mass murder of minorities and 30,000 of our neighbors are willing to send him to the Senate.”⁵⁸

Georgians were not the only voters to embrace Stoner and his message. Even though he was running as a Democrat, NSRP faithful opened offices and held rallies in half a dozen cities. Party gatherings in Connecticut attracted “leaders of other rightwing groups concerned with preserving the rights of white people.” As NSRP state chair Rene Sauzedde explained, “the main thing we’re fighting for is the survival of the white race and the ways of the white people.”⁵⁹

Despite Stoner losing his primary bid, NSRP members were pleased with the results. “Stoner spent only $10,000 for 40,675 votes,” Thunderbolt editor Ed Fields boasted. “Everyone knew we could not win, that our main goal was to reach the public with our message … of White Racism and Anti-Jewism” An upbeat Stoner announced he would run for lieutenant governor in 1974 if Lester Maddox did not enter the race. The only sad news for party faithful was that Wesley Swift had died in October 1970, and Connie Lynch died in September 1972.60

Stoner came away from the defeat feeling optimistic about the future. The end of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition and rising numbers of angry white workers made for a combustible political situation—the kind of situation Stoner liked most. As promised, when Lester Maddox ran for governor of Georgia in 1974, Stoner ran for lieutenant governor, offering the state’s poor whites the same solutions he had been advocating forever. This time, even more people listened. He received 73,000 votes, finishing fifth out of sixteen candidates, winning nearly 10 percent of the Democratic primary total.

Stoner’s rising number of votes in 1972 and 1974 represented the modest but mounting success of his evolving political strategy. Jews were not a national problem in the way Blacks were. By emphasizing racial issues rather than antisemitism, Stoner was winning greater numbers than ever before. In only two years and with little money, he increased his vote total by nearly 34,000. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Assembly of Racist Organizations, Minutemen, Klansmen, and Madole’s NRP members had begun working with the NSRP to promote the interests of “the white race in this country.” The longed-for coalition of the right was finally coming together.⁶¹

16.

The End of Spying

James Madole watched Jesse Stoner’s rise to prominence and wondered where he had gone wrong. When the two first met in New York in August 1953, Madole was a much better-known figure on the far right. He had an established organization, committed recruits, and an important newspaper, the National Renaissance Bulletin. Yet, nearly two decades later, Stoner used the cry of White Power to mobilize a base of support that Madole could only envy. For all their failings, George Lincoln Rockwell and Jesse Stoner had charisma. Madole only had ideological conviction. In the immediate postwar years, that had seemed to be enough. He had been one of the few Americans bold enough to continue Hitler’s legacy in a very public fashion in the center of American Judaism. By the late 1960s that was no longer sufficient to attract a large following. Learning from his peers, Madole pivoted to a new battle cry and attracted more members than ever before.

Madole’s political turn came soon after the American Jewish Committee terminated their undercover operations. Convinced that antisemitism was on the decline, they shifted their resources into supporting the Civil Rights movement and Israel. Always uncomfortable with the idea of Jews spying on Christians, the AJC’s leadership fired Abraham Shoenfeld in April 1964, dissolved its Investigative and Fact-Finding Division, and assigned the division’s head, George Kellman, to the position of in-house counsel—one he had never desired. Henceforth, the AJC would monitor antisemitic activities through its Trends Analyses Division, led by Milton Ellerin. The former FBI agent and son of Russian immigrants was more concerned with respectable “new right” groups such as the John Birch Society and Liberty Lobby than the likes of Madole, Stoner, and Rockwell.

Since beginning his undercover operations in March 1948, Abe Shoenfeld and his operatives had confined their spying largely to the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area. By spring 1964, they perceived Madole and his movement to be in decline. When the White Castle riots failed to generate new membership, Madole stopped holding outdoor rallies in favor of less visible weekly indoor gatherings at his third-floor walkup apartment on West Ninetieth Street.¹

AJC agents reassured their employers that while George Lincoln Rockwell was gaining national attention, his representatives in New York City had failed to recruit enough men to pose a serious threat to local residents. Since the John Birch Society and its allies operated in the open, Ellerin felt no need to have undercover operatives spy on them. Convinced active spying was no longer necessary, Ellerin monitored antisemitic trends by reading multiple far-right publications and getting information from AJC chapters around the country.

George Kellman knew they were wrong, but there was little he could do. He believed antisemitism would never die out. But his peers now regarded him as a Cassandra, constantly prophesying doom to Jews. A younger generation of AJC leaders, his son Barnet later explained, “had historical amnesia about the Jewish past in America and thought my dad was hanging on to the old times. For one brief moment in the mid-1960s, they thought antisemitism was a dead letter. They thought we were in a post antisemitic world. Bernard Malamud was on the bestseller list. Father Coughlin was gone; antisemitism was on the decline.” Unlike Kellman, who advocated constant vigilance, the new generation of AJC officials were either embarrassed by his spy operation or thought it unnecessary. “They wanted to go quiet on the ‘Jew thing.’ As far as they were concerned, they would leave spying on antisemites to the Anti-Defamation League.”²

Those same colleagues were also suspicious of Kellman’s longtime relationship with the FBI. Whatever their limitations, Kellman felt “the FBI were allies. That’s where his work product was put to use. He felt the FBI was more active in pursuing the far-right than the AJC.” Liberal and left coworkers distrusted him for being too close to the Bureau. “They thought I was spying on them,” he told his son, “and believed I was passing information about the AJC to the FBI.”³

After decades of running “quiet” undercover operations that “never left fingerprints on the Jews,” George Kellman became the Willy Loman of the AJC: cast aside and unappreciated after a lifetime of dedicated hard work.⁴

The AJC shut down the Kellman–Shoenfeld undercover operation just before the wave of urban violence and the Black–Jewish split of the mid-1960s led to an upsurge in antisemitism. Fortunately, the Anti-Nazi League’s James Sheldon knew constant vigilance was needed. Believing the threat to antisemitism and racism to be as great as ever, he had recruited several new undercover operatives in the mid-1960s, most notably James Collings and Butch Goring, to work alongside his more experienced spies. Several of those agents had been inside the National Renaissance Party since the 1950s and continued passing information to Sheldon: Joe Rudden, Louis Mostaccio, Ruth Ross (Irene Dovale), and her scorned fiancé, Larry Sestito.

As in the past, none of the spies knew the identity of others working for the Anti-Nazi League. Sheldon was delighted to hire Collings, a journalist who covered far-right movements and was likely the same “Reporter W” or “Reporter C” who had worked for Abe Shoenfeld. He also relied on Butch Goring, the Columbia undergraduate who had begun spying for him in 1962. Both men attended regular weekly meetings at Madole’s apartment and reported back to Sheldon, unaware the other was a spy. The NRP leader’s one-and-a-half-room abode, Collings wrote, was “cluttered with party flags, books and literature … The room is dingy and dated in appearance.” Remembering Collings from the street meetings he covered as a reporter, Madole introduced his latest party member to his mother. Grace Madole, Collings observed, “seems even more vitriolic than her son, if that’s possible. She made it quite plain that the Jews and the Negroes have to go.”⁵

These new undercover recruits came at a propitious moment. Despite the AJC’s belief that antisemitism was declining, Rockwell’s and Stoner’s shift to the cry of White Power drew wider support than ever before. Madole was a shrewd observer of far-right politics and after seeing Rockwell’s meteoric rise, he, too, moved away from Nazi rhetoric to one closer to the Commander’s fixation on the Black menace. In August 1967, the FBI considered Madole dangerous enough to put him on their Rabble Rouser Index, a list of people who might jeopardize national security or public safety.⁶

With the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell that summer, forty-year-old James Madole saw an opportunity to seize the leadership away from Stoner and the fragmented American Nazi movement. On December 8, 1967, he held a “Mass Rally for the Restoration of ‘White Power’ in the US!”—his first major indoor event in four years. With seventy-five people gathered inside the auditorium of Public School 169 on Eighty-Seventh Street between Park and Lexington Avenues, and another thirty-five police assigned to keep order, Madole gave a blistering speech accusing American politicians of abandoning their white constituents and “catering to racial minority blocs.” He blamed Blacks and Jews for causing the nation’s cultural and moral decline as well as for an increase in crime and drug use. Accusing Blacks of breeding faster than whites, Madole predicted that in ten to twenty years “the black man will be in power in our country and do away, yes kill, the white man.”⁷

Madole believed that focusing on the hardships of daily economic life was likely to gain more supporters than repeated racist screeds. He warned of the dire economic consequences that working-class whites would suffer if the Black Power revolution went unchecked. “Our enormous Tax Burden, coupled with the ever-rising cost of living, is bankrupting the masses of Americans.” Every stratum of society “is either living in heavily mortgaged homes or living on credit buying. Poor White families are forced to abide within integrated government housing projects while living in fear of their lives while our bureaucrats dwell in beautiful new duplex apartments.”⁸

To solve the nation’s problems, Madole’s party continued its longtime call to end democracy and radically restructure the American government. Democracy was a system for weaklings. “This country needs to establish a strong autocratic state” with a powerful leader, he told his supporters. “The only way for this country to survive is to have a totalitarian government. With this form of government, we will not allow interracial marriages, dope addicts to roam the streets—muggings and hold-ups will be a thing of the past.”⁹

Unconstrained by democratic principles, Madole’s National Renaissance Party urged patriots to be ready to kill when necessary. “Kill is not an ugly word,” he insisted at rallies, “it is the Right to destroy an enemy … There can be no co-existence between two races at different cultural levels; one must lose.” Playing on the fear of lethal Black Power, Madole argued “If the white man wants to survive, he must kill. The black man wants what the white man has and if the black man attacks, the white man must kill.” Unlike the two mainstream parties, the NRP was committed to building “a society based on the average American and the American home, not nihilism and degeneracy.”¹⁰

James Sheldon knew all this because two of his agents had helped plan that December rally: Joe Rudden (alias John J. Rich) and Butch Goring. Their otherwise dire reports contained one entry that undoubtedly brought a smile to Sheldon’s face. Sitting in the audience were twenty young men and women who wore black patches over one eye in honor of Israel’s war hero and former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe Dayan. Their heckling grew so loud that Madole had the police escort them out of the auditorium.¹¹

Madole’s calls for death to Blacks and the spread of violent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions across the country forced the FBI to take greater action. The murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964—Black activist James Chaney and Jewish coworkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—sparked a wave of national outrage. After years of indifference to Jewish persecution and open hostility to the Anti-Defamation League, J. Edgar Hoover finally praised the Jewish organization for fighting “groups and individuals espousing bigotry, prejudice and extremism.” In January 1968, he ordered local FBI offices in twenty-six cities to “immediately make certain that you have established liaison with the head of the ADL regional office in your territory.”¹²

Although the AJC no longer considered Madole a threat, the FBI and ADL continued monitoring his activities. George Kellman praised his counterparts at the ADL for remaining fully committed to the Civil Rights struggle while “never abandoning their vigilance in regard to antisemites.” Following the death of J. Edgar Hoover in early May 1972, the FBI became more active in tracking right-wing extremists. In the wake of reforms initiated by new director Clarence Kelley, and several years later by the Senate’s Church Committee, the Bureau finally began actively tracking threats on the right as well as threats on the left. The FBI also severed ties with Christian Nationalist groups that Hoover had embraced. Over the next decade, the ADL supplied grateful local Bureau offices with invaluable information about far-right movements in their areas.¹³

When nationalists gathered for the first annual Assembly of Racist Movements in April 1968, Madole traveled to Washington, D.C., with an eye toward playing a major leadership role. Media representatives were banned, but Joe Rudden reported back to the Anti-Nazi League and the FBI. Unable to place their own agents inside the NRP, the FBI, with Sheldon’s approval, had been relying on Rudden for information since March 1965.14

Madole was delighted when delegates unanimously agreed to a four-part program he helped craft that offered voters policies that went beyond simplistic rants: “(1) National citizenship must be based on race, and in the United States and Canada, must be limited to persons of the white race. (2) The U.S. and Canada must recognize and assist other nations with a white racist regime, and work toward an international white imperium. (3) Government must institute a eugenics program for betterment of the race. (4) Government should continue, and even expand, social welfare programs beneficial to the race—especially programs for the ill, the aged, and families of working men w/limited incomes.” As the two-day gathering ended, delegates accepted Madole’s offer to meet in New York the following year. In the meantime, an advisory board would oversee all interim actions.¹⁵

Madole returned to New York confident the National Renaissance Party would lead a revived attack against Blacks and Jews that would attract numerous new supporters. His confidence was merited. Despite earlier claims that antisemitism was declining, the AJC reported that “more than 35 million Americans still retained anti-Jewish attitudes” in 1967. With 40 percent of American Jewry concentrated in the New York area, and more Black residents in New York than in New Orleans, antisemites and racists like Madole had a large potential audience to draw upon. As racial violence continued to erupt in city after city, many frustrated citizens looked for new solutions. Madole saw an opportunity to fill a leadership vacuum, so he moved to fill it.¹⁶

Targeting disgruntled white men, the NRP leader released a new recruiting poster following his return from Washington, D.C. “Are You Rugged Enough?” initiated a campaign that called on Americans aged sixteen to forty “to defend White neighborhoods from rampaging Black Mobs and to counteract the hordes of filthy Jewish beatniks, sexual deviates, and Communist organizers.” Radical action was needed. Conservative groups like the John Birch Society, the poster explained, “will not free America from these marching hordes of malcontents.” All they were doing was writing letters to government officials that wound up in a “wastepaper basket.” He urged tough “young White patriots” to “forget useless Conservatism and heed the call of Blood and Race.”¹⁷

Like Jesse Stoner, James Madole focused on attracting Americans who felt betrayed by their government. After working with young and old NRP members for several years, Butch Goring observed how the NRP and groups like them drew people from four cohorts: “rightist authoritarian groups, urban immigrant and second-generation groups, the misfits, and the bored.” A large proportion of NRP recruits were young men in their teens and early twenties, but the angriest of all members tended to be in their late twenties to mid-forties, the same age cohort that responded most enthusiastically to Jesse Stoner. “During their earlier years,” Goring explained, “they tried to get ahead; now they are past their youth and realize that they have failed to achieve a significant place in society. To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews,” others on the Blacks.¹⁸

Working-class whites who felt abandoned by their government joined far-right groups like the NRP or National States Rights Party to “gain prestige and a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging attracts the failures, the lonely, the homosexuals, the criminals, the morons, the cranks, and all those who cannot fit elsewhere.” The lonely of society, Goring observed, “especially, like this sense of belonging. There is a strong internal feeling of camaraderie from the knowledge that the entire neo-Nazi movement is loathed by all outsiders; for those who join a uniformed corps the feeling is intensified by actual danger.” Madole’s party also attracted “conspirators” who enjoyed “the thrill of shaking off an FBI man—and the adrenaline glands can work full time, giving a few thrills to an otherwise senseless, unimportant life.”¹⁹

[picture]

Madole’s Security Echelon appealed to the machismo of young fascists (NSANL, Columbia University Special Collections)

These were the alienated and betrayed around whom Madole wished to build a movement. Up until now, his reputation within the far right had been as a talented Nazi theorist who published an important newspaper. By 1968, he wanted something more; he wanted to be an important movement leader. Over the next several years, an emboldened Madole organized White Power rallies in New York City; Long Island; New Jersey; and Newburgh, New York. The message was always the same: a “strong totalitarian force” on the right was needed to suppress the Black revolution and put the country back together. The NRP promised to do that by creating “a White Totalitarian Society.” As Madole told FBI agents in March 1968, “the people who built America were not about to sit back and watch it being destroyed by irresponsible black hordes.”²⁰

Madole knew his party was too small to win local, let alone national elections. Like Stoner, he endorsed American Independent Party presidential candidate George Wallace as the only one who could “restore order in our country.” Twenty-five million Blacks, the Nazi leader insisted, “cannot be assimilated and Mr. Wallace realizes this.” That February, the NRP had held a mass rally in Yorkville to support the “White Man’s Candidate.” Insisting that the rot inside America was being caused by a permissive society tolerated by the two major parties, Madole had praised the Alabama hopeful as the one candidate who could “safeguard your family from Black anarchy.” If Wallace succeeded at the polls, it would bode well for men like Madole and Stoner.²¹

Neither the ADL nor ANL had operatives inside Wallace’s inner circle, but James Sheldon had an undercover agent deep inside Wallace’s New Jersey campaign. Larry Sestito, cochair of the far-right Independent Party of New Jersey and an ANL agent since the early 1950s, watched the former Alabama governor win 10 percent of the Garden State’s presidential vote in 1968. Wallace’s local supporters, Sestito wrote to Sheldon, were delighted with the showing. Despite scarce resources and a minimal campaign staff, they had done far better than expected. They viewed 1968 as a dress rehearsal for a more serious presidential run in 1972.22

Wallace’s relative success steeled Madole for more aggressive action. In April 1969, he sponsored a two-day White Power convention in New York that reunited nationalists who had attended the Assembly of Racist Movements. “We have got to stop bickering among ourselves,” he urged delegates. “The Jews know we are not united. We must unite … We are the white elite. Although we are small in number, we are the cream of the crop. There are millions of people out there who believe in nothing. They are receptive. We must get together and go out and win them over to the cause.” Delegates responded favorably to his plea and voted “to support a mutually agreeable platform to be drafted by party fuehrer James Madole.”²³

Madole was slowly gaining the recognition he had craved since the early 1950s. He elevated his status within the movement by forging alliances with NSRP and Nazi leaders in New Jersey, Maryland, and California. His networking efforts and emphasis on combating Black Power succeeded in expanding the NRP. By the middle of 1969, his party claimed to have 3,000 dues-paying members, with branches in Los Angeles, Chicago, Wichita, Michigan, and throughout the New York metropolitan area. By comparison, Rockwell’s American Nazi party claimed 2,000 dues-paying members at its peak.²⁴

Madole’s street rallies and vicious condemnations of Blacks and Jews did not sit well with all New Yorkers. Jewish War Veterans regularly heckled NRP speakers at their rallies, while neighborhood onlookers greeted the New York führer with barrages of tomatoes, lettuce, and ice cubes. Residents of Yorkville, the site of most of the rallies, grew tired of the noise and constant police presence. Many responded by hanging outside tenement windows blowing whistles, jeering, and blaring the national anthem out of loudspeakers to disrupt gatherings. These actions did little to stop Madole. He simply purchased his own loudspeakers, pumped up the volume, and projected his voice over all others.²⁵

Madole’s subsequent success was bolstered by a renewed outbreak of antisemitic violence that swept the city and nation in late 1960s and early ’70s. In the aftermath of Israel’s Six-Day War, antisemites attacked elderly Jews, synagogues, and Jewish institutions throughout the city and on Long Island. They painted swastikas on walls, set off firebombs, and desecrated cemeteries. In June 1969, the West Bronx Center of Religious Zionists was destroyed by fire, while a series of local temples and yeshivas suffered similar incidents of destruction. Anti-Jewish violence extended well beyond New York as fires destroyed parts of Beth-El temple in Bethesda, Maryland, while bombs exploded outside a synagogue in Skokie, Illinois, and at Jewish homes in Meridian and Jackson, Mississippi.²⁶

New York’s antisemitic outbreaks were also sparked by rising Black and Jewish tensions over public school battles. A series of New York City school strikes in 1968 and 1969 pitted the largely Jewish United Federation of Teachers union against the largely Black and Puerto Rican governing board of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district. Tensions got so bad that angry residents threatened picketing white teachers, calling them “blue-eyed pigs” and “Jew pigs,” and promising, “You will go out in a pine box.”²⁷

Madole seized upon rising Black antisemitism to drive a wedge in the Jewish–Black alliance. Jewish War Veteran Emanuel Goldstein attended a particularly virulent meeting in early 1969 and heard Madole “telling the black man how the Jew has been using him all these years and it’s time the black man got even.” Jews, he told the crowd, were behind Black violence in New York and across the nation. The only way to stop it was to join the NRP.²⁸

As Black–White and Black–Jewish tensions mounted over the next two years, Madole used the call for White Power to draw increasingly larger crowds to his rallies. Over 2,500 people turned out for a White Power rally in August 1969, many carrying signs that read WHITE POWER and JEWS MUST GO. In between meetings, Madole’s minions traveled to different part of the city passing out thousands of NRP leaflets urging patriotic New Yorkers to join their party in thwarting the Jewish–Black menace.²⁹

James Sheldon and the ADL’s Arnold Forster knew that spying required patience and an eye toward the long run. Not all Jews, however, were so patient or subtle in their resistance to hate. Angered by widespread physical attacks, New York Rabbi Meir Kahane launched the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the summer of 1968 and vowed to use fists rather than spies to protect coreligionists from harm. Adopting the slogan “Never again,” the JDL targeted Madole as the key focus of their wrath. After a fight broke out in Brooklyn between five JDL members and several NRP storm troopers in June 1969, Kahane took out a full-page ad in the New York Times: “Is This Any Way for Nice Jewish Boys to Behave?” Justifying their use of violence, he explained, “there are times when there is no other way to get across to the extremist that the Jew is not quite the patsy some think he is … Maybe in time of crisis Jewish boys should not be that nice. Maybe—just maybe—nice people build their own road to Auschwitz.”³⁰

Kahane’s men had a particular loathing for the NRP’s uniformed Security Echelon. A vicious battle in October 1969 left two SE men hospitalized. A year later, SE commander Bob Woodcock had his head split open by an axe in another violent confrontation. In December 1970, a major assault on the NRP headquarters was thwarted when SE troopers armed with baseball bats and clubs held off JDL fighters until the police arrived.³¹

Despite the rapidly growing ranks of the JDL—14,500 nationally and 10,000 in New York by 1971—Madole refused to be intimidated by Jewish threats. In January 1971, NRP loyalist Martin Kerr marveled at how the slightly built führer had traded punches “toe to toe with a JDL member twice his size and half his age during a brawl at New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal.” Madole and two SE troopers had been arrested and charged with assault and possession of dangerous weapons. After spending a night in jail, all three men were released and the charges dropped.³²

Repeated clashes between Nazis and Jews generated welcomed publicity for the NRP and its leader. Yet, despite his growing regional prominence, Madole never achieved the widespread notoriety of Rockwell or Stoner. Unlike his two rivals, he considered himself a theorist more than a grassroots activist and that—along with a lack of charisma—ultimately limited his success. Rockwell and Stoner went out on the road to build a movement. Madole wanted the movement to come to him. Madole hated traveling and while he made occasional appearances outside of New York, he left the task of national organizing to supporters elsewhere. After working closely with him for several years, Butch Goring concluded that while Madole was indeed “an extremely brilliant theorist, [he] is no fighting leader of a people’s movement.”³³

Unwilling to do the heavy work required of a movement leader, Madole tried achieving greater prominence by following the path laid out by Rockwell and Stoner and doing as many local radio and television appearances as possible. In one instance, Madole appeared on a Pennsylvania cable broadcast “Interview with a Fascist” flanked by his uniformed Security Echelon. Several years later, the NRP became the first white nationalist organization to produce its own local cable access television show.³⁴

Whatever his limitations, by 1971 Madole succeeded in establishing the NRP as the preeminent Nazi group in the Northeast and a rising force on the far-right national scene. ADL leaders worried that Madole would use a recent spike in antisemitic incidents and organizations to attract new members. A Newsweek poll in March 1971 found that 34 percent of Jews believed antisemitism had been increasing over the past few years, while 41 percent thought it had remained at a steady level.³⁵

Despite his grand dreams, neither Madole nor his party achieved their goal of forging a powerful Nazi presence in the United States. His success was thwarted not only by his unwillingness to travel throughout the country recruiting new members, but by a second assassination attempt that left him permanently damaged. Madole had survived an initial effort to kill him in February 1958 when Al Richman, a Jew, had shown up at his apartment at midnight with a Mauser pistol. Six hours later, Richmond had left after Madole talked him out of murdering him and his mother. He was not so lucky the next time.³⁶

Soon after Edward Tournier moved from New Orleans to New York in 1970, he began attending NRP meetings at Madole’s apartment. Several months later, after Tournier had proved his loyalty, Madole asked the twenty-year-old transplant to join his Security Echelon. Tournier happily agreed, but when he confessed that his mother was Jewish, Madole withdrew the invitation. Jews and half-Jews, he explained, were excluded from the NRP. When Tournier turned hostile, SE men beat him up and threw him down a flight of stairs. “Spies and potential spies,” snarled one NRP thug, “had to know that they could not just waltz in and out of our headquarters without paying a price.”³⁷

A furious Tournier began stalking Madole. On April 2, 1971, the slightly built 110-pound Louisianan attacked Madole from behind as the two entered the Bankers Trust building on Wall Street. After exchanging punches, Tournier pulled a brick from his pocket, screamed, “I hate your guts, you bastard!” and smashed it into Madole’s skull. Tournier then raced out of the bank, never to be seen again.³⁸

The brick fractured Madole’s skull and severed an artery in his head, drenching him in blood. He was immediately taken to Beekman Hospital, where doctors discovered a broken bone pressing on his brain. Madole underwent emergency surgery and had several inches of bone removed from his skull. The severely injured patient was hospitalized for two weeks and told to return in six months for a second surgery to implant an iron plate to replace the missing bone. Madole never did. “For the last eight years of his life,” recounted one admiring NRP member, “there was nothing between Madole’s brain and the outside world but a thin flap of skin—but still he went on demonstrations.”³⁹

Madole survived the second assassination attempt but was now a shadow of his former self. The Nazi leader, observed one supporter, “was overweight, out of shape and badly asthmatic and as such hardly made a daunting physical impression.” Worse yet, to protect his head against further physical attacks, Madole wore a football helmet to all demonstrations, which made him look ridiculous and diminished any sense of strength or power. The FBI noticed the change. After receiving word from agents that the near-deadly attack had blunted Madole’s leadership abilities, the Bureau transferred him from its Agitator Index to its less threatening Security Index. Five months later, the FBI removed Madole from that as well. Bureau agents kept monitoring NRP activities but believed its head was no longer “a danger to the internal security of the United States.”⁴⁰

Tournier’s attack altered Madole’s personality and political agenda in a way that proved fatal to his party’s fortunes. The NRP enjoyed greater popularity after adopting White Power as its rallying cry and focusing on economic grievances and a belief that not enough was being done for ordinary white people. Following his release from the hospital, a much-changed Madole veered away from those ideas in favor of emphasizing causes that supporters found peripheral to their lives. When Frederick Weiss died in March 1968, Madole lost the one advisor who might had helped him find his way back to the issues that had attracted the greatest attention. Madole returned to emphasizing his earlier pro-Nazi, pro-Arab agenda.

Since the early 1950s, the NRP had been a militant advocate of Arab struggles in the Middle East. The National Renaissance Bulletin regularly published articles attacking Israel as “the Vampire State of the Middle East” and calling for armed rebellion against Zionist forces. This was done for financial as well as ideological reasons. Unable to hold down a regular job, the financially strapped Madole received generous funding from Egyptian, Iraqi, and myriad Arab organizations in exchange for writing sympathetic articles and advertising pro-Arab publications. However, his continued diatribes against Jews, Israel, Zionism, and the United Nations, and his annual celebration of Hitler’s birthday, held little appeal for most citizens.⁴¹

Madole made another fatal error by having his Security Echelon always appear in Nazi-like uniforms at his rallies. Conservative New Yorkers may not have liked Jews, but seeing storm troopers march down city street in uniforms like Hitler’s SS and giving Nazi salutes at rallies seemed un-American. By the early 1970s, Nazism had lost its resonance while racism was rising. Madole simply could not adjust to changing times or changes in far-right politics. His beloved Security Echelon reminded citizens of foreign ideologies rather than an American party devoted to American ideas.

Over the next several years, Madole embraced esoteric occult theories. Since his youth, he had maintained a strong interest in science fiction, ritual magic, and occult theory—all of which he kept to himself. Following his brain injury, he produced a series of lengthy essays, “‘The New Atlantis’: A Blueprint for an Aryan ‘Garden of Eden’ in North America,” that merged Eastern traditions of Hinduism, Druidism, and theosophy with twentieth-century science, magic, and National Socialism to produce a vision of godlike Aryans who would rule the world from the United States. His bizarre writings spoke of Aryan Man’s racial “heritage stretching back over ONE MILLION YEARS into prehistoric times and his forthcoming Divine Mission to create a higher type of humanity beside which, mankind of the 20th century will appear as mental and physical anachronisms.”⁴²

Breaking with most far-right groups, Madole rejected Christianity, arguing that it, as well as Judaism and Islam, had arisen in the Semitic deserts and had nothing to do with Aryans. Their religion had come from Atlantis, and had later been passed to India, Tibet, Egypt, Greece, and finally the modern world. Madole concluded his series by promising that his party’s union of physical science with occult science would create a new human race and an earthly paradise for Aryan Man. To hasten that day, he began forging links with occult organizations such as Anton Szandor LaVey’s Church of Satan.⁴³

None of this sat well with Security Echelon troopers or rank-and-file NRP members. Madole’s decision to replace a militant National Socialist agenda with an emphasis on the occult, observed disgruntled fascist Martin Kerr, led to the mass “exodus from the party of many key leaders and activists.” With the defection of his most serious members, the ranks of the NRP were increasingly filled with more and more marginal individuals.⁴⁴

By 1974, three years after the failed assassination, Madole had lost his way. Even his most strident supporters wondered whether he was still capable of leading a Nazi movement. Madole “vacillates from day to day,” one undercover operative told the FBI that June. Members wanted to find “someone with a more forceful personality to lead the group.”⁴⁵

With Madole no longer posing the threat he once had, James Sheldon cut back on his undercover operations. Larry Sestito and Joe Rudden continued sending reports, but Sheldon shifted his energies into working with the Democratic Party and religious organizations such as the Council of Churches of the City of New York, the Protestant Council, the Christian Social Action Department, and the American Association of United Nations.⁴⁶

Sheldon’s days as a spymaster came to an end on April 16, 1975, when he suffered a heart attack and died in his midtown Manhattan apartment. For more than four decades, the Midwestern Methodist had led the most ambitious nongovernment postwar undercover operation in the United States. His death also signaled the demise of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. Within a short time, the ANL shut down its offices on West Forty-Sixth Street and ceased to be.⁴⁷

The long era of spying that had begun in the 1940s slowly came to an end. On September 27, 1977, former AJC spymaster Abe Shoenfeld died peacefully at New York’s Roosevelt Hospital. Two years later, Arnold Forster, who had overseen spy operations for the ADL’s civil rights division, retired from active duty, but he remained a general counsel until 2003. The ADL continued spying on far-right groups well into the twenty-first century, but not with the vigor of earlier years. By the 1990s, their undercover operations focused on anti-Israel groups. Fortunately, the FBI stepped up its undercover operations against far-right groups, especially after the Church Committee blasted it for attacking the Civil Rights movement while ignoring threats on the far right.⁴⁸

James Madole led a declining National Renaissance Party until he was stricken by cancer in late 1978. On May 6, 1979, the fifty-one-year-old New York führer passed away. Grace Madole attempted to keep the movement alive by transferring its leadership to Andrej Lisanik, a ruthless SE commander who had served as an officer in the Czech army during World War II. But a year later, Lisanik was killed by a mugger and the NRP records he was carrying with him were scattered over the blood-splattered New York City streets, never to be recovered. By the end of 1980, the NRP, like its leaders, was dead.⁴⁹

From the beginning of his career and until the second attack on his life in 1971, James Madole had posed a serious threat not simply to Jews and Blacks but to democracy itself. If it had been up to him, democracy would have been abolished and replaced by an autocratic state that would have created a white utopia by executing or deporting Blacks and Jews. At the very least, his party would have prohibited them from occupying any position in American government or society. With his death and the death of his successor, the NRP and many of its goals disappeared.

Taken collectively, the undercover operations mounted by the ADL, AJC, and ANL succeeded in generating a paranoia among far-right leaders that weakened their movement. Jewish spies were everywhere, and no one could be trusted. In 1976, an anonymously written homophobic forty-page booklet known as the DeGuello Report was sent to reliable nationalists around the country warning that their movement had been compromised by Jewish agents and organizations. It accused James Madole of being an “aging homosexual” financed by the Jews and vilified Jesse Stoner as a gay ADL agent and “especially destructive Jew infiltrator” who spewed outrageous venom in hopes of convincing most Americans that the nationalist movement “must be totally insane.” Other prominent nationalists such as Conde McGinley, James Warner, H. Keith Thompson, Roy Frankhouser, and Bertrand Comparet were similarly accused of being homosexuals, socialists, Jewish agents, or all three.⁵⁰

As the decade ended, ADL leaders were convinced that antisemitism was on the decline and the need for spying was minimal. “Our priorities are no longer the kind of anti-Semitism that used to stalk us,” national director Nathan Perlmutter explained. The ADL had “won the battle against” the kind of postwar Nazism and fascism that had plagued American Jewry since the end of World War II. University quotas, restricted housing covenants, and other long-standing forms of discrimination had largely come to an end. The ADL was now “more concerned with dangers to the status of our free world and our democracy all of which impinge on Jewish security.” Modest spying on far-right groups continued, but defense of Israel was now their top priority.⁵¹

Milton Ellerin and the AJC shared a similar perspective on the declining threat posed by the far right. “In their notions of what American politics is about, the various Nazi groups and leaders show themselves ludicrously out of touch with reality,” he wrote in 1977. Their movement “has failed to develop a motivating philosophy or attract a political figure of stature to its cause.” The “totality of the Nazi program offered to the American public as a panacea for all its troubles is to ship blacks ‘back to Africa, and death to all Zionist Jews.’” Despite their best efforts, groups such as the National States Rights Party had failed to generate sufficient policies and support to create a viable third party. Ellerin estimated the total number of Nazis in 1977 to be no more than 1,500 to 2,000. A golden age of civil rights and American Jewish life finally seemed possible.⁵²

The AJC, ADL, and ANL thought they had won the battle against hate, especially hate toward Jews that had begun in the 1920s, continued after Pearl Harbor, and resumed following the end of World War II. The success of their longtime undercover operations convinced them that while antisemitism and racism would never totally disappear, they had finally been brought under control.

For a moment it seemed true. The four godfathers of postwar White Supremacy no longer posed a serious threat. George Lincoln Rockwell was dead. James Madole was dead. Columbian leader Emory Burke continued working with nationalists and militias as an advisor but no longer as a leader. Jesse Stoner hoped to assume the mantle as the leader of White Supremacy, but he would soon face the prospect of a long jail sentence.

The initial optimism shared by the three organizations was misplaced. Antisemitism and racism were far from dead. New groups and new leaders, many led by former officers in the NRP or Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, sprang up throughout the country and continued to draw new members. These included the National Socialist Party of America, Chicago, which was led by former ANP leader Frank Collin, whose father, Max, was a Jewish survivor of Dachau concentration camp. In Los Angeles, gay Nazis formed the National Socialist League, “‘America’s first and only’ homophile neo-Nazi organization.” Although shunned by other Nazi groups, its members opened branches in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco and published the National Socialist Mobilizer in hopes of attracting more homosexuals to the movement.⁵³

The war against hate was far from over. Many on the far right still fought for a Jew-free, Black-free nation. Some of these groups remained highly visible, others went underground. But they all swore to continue the battle until they won. With Madole’s death and the demise of the National Renaissance Party, Jesse B. Stoner emerged as the nation’s most powerful racial nationalist and the leader most likely to realize their collective dream of a pure white America.

17.

The Last Godfather of White Supremacy

Magical thinking during the mid-1960s and early 1970s clouded the vision of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, and Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. Their collective belief that American Jews were entering a golden era of acceptance proved short-lived. Antisemitism and racism reemerged in the mid-1970s and 1980s even in the most respected of places. As the Reverend Bailey Smith told the 13.4 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention, “God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”¹

During the 1976 presidential election, formerly optimistic AJC leaders feared “there is a fairly good chance that [independent] groups could be grabbed by a ‘man on a white horse’; if the economy slipped enough.” Pollster Daniel Yankelovich warned of a “serious potential drift toward authoritarianism” that would work to the disadvantage of “many minority groups who fare badly when democratic processes are threatened.”²

With the traditional Black-Jewish alliance growing increasingly frayed, especially after the rise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Stoner was convinced he was the man to challenge those so-called democratic processes. The “pallid slightly built man who walks with a limp” and “can talk very loud,” observed the Atlanta Constitution, had used the cry of White Power to attract a new generation of supporters. As a “muscular young man with long, weedy brown hair” who was selling copies of the Thunderbolt told a reporter, he had quit the American Nazi Party and joined the National States Rights Party because “they’re the same thing. Only we don’t use a swastika.”³

Relying yet again on Christian Identity teachings, Stoner used attacks on Jews and Blacks—such as his 1974 publication Christ Not a Jew and Jews Not God’s Chosen People—to draw greater numbers of voters to his campaigns. After three decades on the road, Stoner still had grand visions of forging an international fascist front with him as its American face. In September 1976, he received “thundering cheers from the throng” of delegates from thirty-five countries when he spoke at the inaugural International Patriotic Congress in Metairie, Louisiana. The worldwide anti-Jewish congress, he boasted, marked the first successful effort in forty years by “rightwing organizations to form a united front against the Jews.” With the Klan throwing its support behind his campaigns, Stoner believed it was only a matter of time until he would win high office and inaugurate a new era of Christian nationalism at home and abroad.⁴

Stoner’s future ambitions were soon thwarted by his past actions. For the first time in his life, the man who had spent decades terrorizing Blacks and Jews found himself facing the prospect of years in prison for a bombing committed nearly twenty years earlier.

At 1:30 A.M. on June 29, 1958, Will Hall, the night watchman at Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church, saw smoke coming from a wall outside the city’s oldest Black church. When he discovered a five-gallon paint can filled with sixteen sticks of dynamite, Hall carried it into the street before it exploded, shattering the church’s stained-glass windows and blowing a two-foot hole in the immediate area. The dynamite was meant as a warning to the city’s leading civil rights activist, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. This was his second warning. His church had been bombed on Christmas Day 1956, but Shuttlesworth had refused to be intimidated. There were no initial suspects, but witnesses told police they had seen a car full of white men in the area shortly before the explosion. Jesse Stoner was a prime suspect, yet no evidence could be found tying him to the explosion. He claimed he was not in Alabama the day the bomb went off.

Five years later, a fatal third warning was sent with the bombing, on September 15, 1963, of the 16th Street Baptist Church that had killed four young girls. Jerry Dutton refused to talk to the FBI, referring them to his attorney, Jesse Stoner. The murders remained unsolved.

Murder has no statute of limitations in Alabama. Soon after taking office in 1971, Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley reopened the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case. Fearing embarrassment, J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI not to share its files with Baxley. The FBI chief worried about the blowback if it was discovered that Bureau informant John Wesley Hall had been involved in the bombing. Consequently, Hoover twice refused the Birmingham office’s request to seek prosecution and cautioned them not to let the Justice Department know how much evidence they had compiled.⁵

Baxley was a patient man. In 1975, three years after Hoover died, he led the parents of the four murdered girls to Washington, D.C., and obtained enough information from the Bureau to indict seventy-three-year-old former Klansman “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss on four counts of murder. When Thunderbolt editor Edward Fields wrote to Baxley accusing him of being “an honorary nigger” and suggesting he might meet an early demise, the fearless attorney general wrote back, “Dear ‘Dr’ Fields: My response to your letter of Feb. 19, 1976, is—kiss my ass.”⁶

In November 1977, a Birmingham jury of three Black and nine white jurors found Chambliss guilty. The judge sentenced him to life in prison. “Dynamite Bob” died several years later, still proclaiming his innocence.

Baxley’s patience and determination yielded a second bonus. Although the FBI files did not decisively link Stoner to the 1963 bombing, they contained sufficient evidence to indict him for the 1958 bombing of Shuttlesworth’s church. In Alabama, placing a bombing against an inhabited dwelling constituted a capital crime punishable by life in prison. Stoner now faced the prospect of a lengthy jail sentence.

In mid-September 1977, a grand jury in Alabama indicted Jesse B. Stoner for the 1958 church explosion. Several days later, he was arrested in Marietta, Georgia. Appearing before Cobb County Superior Court judge James Bullard, the NSRP head denied the charges, claiming that he had turned down an FBI informant’s offer of $2,000 to bomb Shuttlesworth’s church. The FBI, he told the press, “have been trying to get me for years.” The subsequent bombing, he insisted, had been done by Black activists who wanted to garner sympathy for their cause. When Alabama prosecutors vowed to seek the death penalty for the 1958 explosion, Stoner asked Georgia Governor George Busbee to refuse any extradition request from the Alabama courts.⁷

Even if Busbee agreed to extradition, Stoner expected that Alabama Governor George Wallace would turn down any such entreaty. He was wrong. After Wallace signed the extradition order, Stoner appealed the decision. Fourteen months later, the Cobb County Superior Court ruled that Stoner could not be compelled to stand trial in Alabama because officials had failed to prove he had been in Birmingham on the date of the bombing. Hoping to avoid prison by getting elected to high office, Stoner ran for governor of Georgia in 1978 and finished third in the Democratic primaries, receiving 37,654 votes (5.4 percent) out of 695,911.8

His reprieve was short-lived. Georgia’s supreme court overturned the lower court ruling and ordered him to stand trial in Alabama. Stoner filed a futile last-ditch plea with the U.S. Supreme Court, but they refused to review his case.⁹

On January 11, 1980, Stoner limped into a Birmingham courtroom wearing his familiar bow tie and small Confederate flag and surrendered to authorities, ending a two-and-a-half-year battle to avoid extradition. Pleading not guilty, he was released on a $20,000 bond posted by eight Klansmen. Four months later, the prosecution presented its case against the longtime White Supremacist. After deliberating for less than ninety minutes, a Birmingham jury of eleven white men and women and one Black man found him guilty of conspiring to bomb the Bethel Baptist Church in 1958. Stoner was sentenced to ten years in prison, the minimum amount of time allowed by the law. Denying his guilt, he insisted, “I was prosecuted for my political, racial, and religious beliefs. I already believe that this is a Jew-ruled society where there is no freedom for Christians.”¹⁰

For the first time in his life, Jesse B. Stoner was on the losing side of the law. On January 28, 1983, he was ordered to report to the Jefferson County sheriff’s office to begin serving his sentence. Bill Baxley and the Alabama courts had succeeded in doing what the ADL, AJC, and ANL could not: they had forced Stoner to stop his activities and had called him to account. But he was not ready to submit to the law. When he failed to show up at the sheriff’s office, the Justice Department charged him with unlawful flight to avoid confinement. Stoner had withdrawn $12,500 from his Marietta bank account and fled to parts unknown. Thus began a dramatic nationwide manhunt for the South’s most notorious fugitive.¹¹

Stoner feared for his life. He had repeatedly threatened to kill agents of what he derisively referred to as the Federal Bureau of Integration. He was now convinced that the FBI would take revenge by murdering him rather than bringing him in alive. And even if they did not, he was certain he would be killed by Black inmates while serving his time in jail. For the next three months, Stoner was pursued by G-men and bounty hunters employed by Alabama bondsman Sonny Kyle Livingston, a former Klansman who had confessed to racist bombings in 1957 but had been acquitted by an all-white jury. Like the cartoon character Waldo, Stoner and his brown Lincoln Continental were seen everywhere. Livingston initially claimed Stoner was hiding in Mississippi. “I believe J. B. is in fear for his life, but he’s no dummy,” he said. “He knows that he can’t run.” Stoner’s longtime friend and collaborator Edward Fields suggested he was in Georgia. The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center received postcards from Las Vegas and elsewhere signed by Stoner as “Chief of the High Command of the Aryan Resistance.” Other sightings put him in Florida, Arkansas, and Texas; one report suggested he was about to flee to South Africa, where he would be greeted as a hero by the apartheid regime.¹²

The FBI’s extensive search took them throughout the South and Southwest and into Mexico. “J. B. Stoner has threatened FBI agents in the past,” his pursuers were warned, and his “acquaintances have a propensity towards violence. Approach with caution and consider armed and dangerous.” Agents interviewed members of the Ku Klux Klan, the National States Rights Party, the American Nazi Party, and other well-known members of the far right. The most accurate sighting came in April, when Stoner was spotted in Mexico City accompanied by Gordon Kahl, a member of the Posse Comitatus movement who was wanted for killing two U.S. marshals in North Dakota. FBI informants reported the two fugitives were “receiving aid from unknown prominent authorities in Mexico.” Once again, caution was urged when approaching the potentially deadly pair.¹³

After several months of evading capture, an ill Stoner grew tired of being on the run. On June 2, 1983, at 6:30 A.M., ready to turn himself in, he called his bail bondsman and asked to be picked up the next day in front of the Midtown Montgomery Holiday Inn. When Sonny Livingston pulled up in his van, a relieved Stoner told him, “I’m glad I turned to you. The FBI could not arrest me and never would have arrested me.” When Livingston revealed he was cooperating with the Bureau, Stoner shut up. Four months and five days after he had fled Alabama, Stoner was taken into custody by the state’s department of corrections and sent to Kirby Prison in Montgomery, the same facility that housed “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss. “I am a white political prisoner,” he complained to a reporter.¹⁴

Stoner’s paranoia was merited. The day after he surrendered to authorities, his companion in flight, Gordon Kahl, was killed in a shootout with FBI agents and Arkansas state police.

As he feared, Stoner did not fare well in prison. His lawyers complained that he might die mysteriously while in jail, if not from Black assassins then from jailers who withheld medicine vital to treat his diabetes and high blood pressure. Stoner was soon transferred to a five-by-eight-foot concrete and steel security cell in Atmore, Alabama, near Holman prison, site of Alabama’s electric chair. “J. B. has taken prison life very badly,” his good friend Jerry Ray observed. “Even before reporting to prison, after his much-publicized disappearance, J. B. broke down and was unable to eat or sleep. He sobbed uncontrollably at the thought that he would be murdered in prison.” The longtime terrorist now lived a life filled with daily terror.¹⁵

On October 5, 1986, after serving three and a half years, Stoner was paroled for good behavior. Still proclaiming his innocence, he told the press he was “more determined than ever before” to restore White Supremacist rule. Returning to Marietta, the now disbarred attorney resumed his “Crusade Against Corruption,” a campaign that heralded AIDS as an act of divine intervention against Blacks, Jews, and homosexuals. “I praise God for AIDS. We are now certain of White victory.” To ensure racial survival he once again called on government authorities to stop the “immigrant invasion of America by Jews and other colored races NOW. Round ’em up Move ’em out.”¹⁶

Jesse Stoner survived his time in jail, but his days as a movement leader were over. As soon as the National States Rights Party head was incarcerated, a vicious fight broke out over selecting his successor. Edward Fields, editor of the Thunderbolt and Stoner’s longtime ally, seemed the natural choice, but his “smooth personality and alleged womanizing” did not sit well with all members, many of whom thought he was siphoning off money to support his luxurious lifestyle. NSRP staff members considered him “a money-grubber” and disliked him “because he had at least two wives, patronized prostitutes, frequented discos and misused NSRP funds.” In August 1983, the party’s executive committee expelled Ed Fields, accusing him of “personal immorality” and diverting money to his recently founded New Order Knights.¹⁷

Without Stoner to adjudicate members’ grievances, the NSRP collapsed in May 1984.

Dissidents formed the States’ Rights Voters League, but it too would soon collapse, as did Fields’s New Order Knights. Jesse Stoner was now a man without a party. Like Emory Burke, the Columbian leader who had inspired him forty years earlier, Stoner became an eminence grise within the far right, a much-respected figure but one without a following.¹⁸

Stoner had been most popular when he was most violent in the 1950s and early 1960s. By the 1970s, he had abandoned the bomb in favor of the ballot. While he proved a relentless campaigner, he never attracted the mass support he had envisioned. He was too far to the right for most voters and even members of the Ku Klux Klan. “They’re mostly too moderate for me and I’m a little too extreme for them.”¹⁹

Stoner was not, however, extreme enough for the emerging ranks of militia movements. Instead of taking power through the electoral process, longtime disgruntled members of the extreme far right preferred withdrawing from party politics in favor of building an armed militia movement that could one day seize control of the government and place a white Christian patriot in the White House. Many militia leaders had served apprenticeships with Stoner, Rockwell, Madole, Burke, or Christian Identity church founder Wesley Swift. Their apprenticeships taught them that electoral politics was a dead end. Instead, they would organize a movement around Christian Identity and a readiness to embrace violence against government authorities who impinged on their “sovereignty.” While Stoner was busily trying to avoid jail, William Potter Gale and Robert Girnt Butler formed the two most important paramilitary groups of the 1970s and 1980s.

After helping Swift found the California Rangers in the early 1960s, former army lieutenant colonel Gale, a National States Rights Party member, had launched the Posse Comitatus (Latin for “power of the county”) in 1969. His Guide for Volunteer Christian Posses rejected federal authority and argued “the COUNTY has always been—and remains to this day—the TRUE seat of government for the citizens who are inhabitants thereof. The County Sheriff is the only legal law enforcement officer in these United States of America.” The group that spawned the sovereign citizen movement argued that only the sheriff had the power to mobilize men between 18 and 45 to form a posse comitatus. If the Sheriff refused to carry out the will of the people, then citizens had the right to remove him from office and hang him “by the neck, the body remaining until sundown as an example to those who would subvert the law.”²⁰

Continuing Swift’s preaching’s, Gale’s Christian Identity group declared Jews to be part of the “synagogue of Satan” and Blacks subhuman “mud people.” These self-proclaimed patriots believed that “Our nation is now completely under the control of the International Invisible government of the World Jewry.” Consequently, they refused to pay taxes, obtain driver’s licenses, or fulfill other duties required of citizens. But there was a price to pay for their resistance. In October 1987, Gale and four associates were sentenced to federal prison for a year and a day for threatening the lives of IRS agents and a Nevada judge. The arrests made Gale a hero. His movement soon spread throughout the United States.²¹

After a bitter quarrel with Gale in the 1970s, former Lockheed aircraft engineer “Reverend” Richard Girnt Butler, who had worked with Burke and Rockwell, moved Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ–Christian to an isolated twenty-acre compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, and founded the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. Like the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations members believed the United States was under the control of ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government.²²

Butler knew that Stoner’s call for the deportation of Blacks and extermination of Jews was not a possibility. Consequently, he called on far-right groups to “deport” themselves to the Pacific Northwest, where they could create armed, self-governing all-white Christian Identity enclaves that would plan for an Aryan American future. Butler urged followers to sever “all political connections between them and the Federal government” and set up a “free and independent nation” that would have “full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to perform all other acts which independent nations may of right do.” He also called on supporters to smash the “lying murdering Jews” and promised that when the Aryan Nations came to power all interracial marriage would be “punished by Death.”²³

To aid their recruitment efforts, Butler organized an annual World Congress of Aryan Nations that met every summer at Hayden Lake starting in 1981. In addition to inviting speakers from other Christian Identity and extremist organizations, such as the now esteemed Emory Burke, the gatherings featured training sessions in urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Although Butler and his ilk considered Jesse Stoner too timid to confront the Zionist power in America, they honored him for his lifelong efforts on behalf of White Supremacy by giving him their “Aryans of Outstanding Valor” award in July 1982.24

The rapid spread of antigovernment paramilitary hate groups such as the Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus, and Christian Defense League worried ADL leaders, who estimated membership in the latter two groups at 10,000 men and women in 1983. Individuals like Jesse Stoner were now the least of their concerns. The number of new militias and their dedicated followers kept growing. By 1994, the ADL estimated there were 346 discrete hate groups with over 20,000 members. The FBI was even more concerned. According to their estimates, the Posse Comitatus had between 12,000 and 50,000 members in 78 chapters spread across 23 states.²⁵

Jesse Stoner had spent a lifetime articulating a vision of a nation without Blacks or Jews. Jail did little to temper those views. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the elder statesman of White Supremacy maintained close ties with the Ku Klux Klan and militia units, receiving awards and giving fiery keynote speeches at many of their gatherings. In January 1987, Stoner traveled to a White Power rally in Georgia’s Forsyth County and incited the local Southern White Knights into brutal attacks on civil rights marchers. “Niggers bring crime and AIDS,” he told the frenzied crowd, “and we don’t need crime or AIDS in Forsyth County.” A year later, he rallied members of seven rival Klans to attend a cross-burning outside Powder Springs, Georgia, where he blared his racist messages via a loudspeaker near the all-Black Macedonia Baptist Church. Attempting one last quest for high office, Stoner ran for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 1990 on a platform accusing Jews and Blacks of conspiring against white Americans. He received 30,804 votes out of 947,108 cast in the Democratic primary.²⁶

By century’s end, Jesse Stoner was still known and loathed in the nation’s Black community. Rapper Ice Cube singled out Stoner for special recognition in “My Skin Is My Sin,” which appeared on his Lethal Injection album. After denouncing White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger, he warned “the cracker J.B. Stoner” not to be caught on isolated corners by himself.²⁷

Age and a failing body would accomplish what Stoner’s enemies could not: they brought a complete halt to his activities. In 2001, the already frail man who could no longer lift his right hand without the aid of his left suffered a debilitating stroke that forced him to move into a nursing home in LaFayette, Georgia. A year later, he mourned the loss of his mentor Emory Burke. Filled with piss and vinegar to the very end, in 1992 the Columbian founder had published a 545-page diatribe called The Unlifted Curse that warned: “We Caucasians must breed only with Caucasians, and obey the natural law that thunders through the whole world of living beings: Thou shalt breed only with thine own kind.”²⁸

Always enjoying the limelight, a frail Jesse Stoner, who had withered away to 110 pounds, gave a final interview in July 2004. Far from mellowing in his old age, the unrepentant racist and antisemite considered himself “a soldier of Christ” who regretted none of his past actions. “If I was still active, I’d still be the same. I’d like to go out and make a speech. Some thought coming into this institution would change me, but a person isn’t supposed to apologize for being right.” Refusing to concede defeat, he promised that the movement he had helped build would “come back better than ever.”²⁹

[picture]

Stoner needs to use left hand to swear oath in congressional hearings (Getty Images)

On April 23, 2005, eighty-one-year-old Jesse Stoner died from complications of pneumonia. He was buried three days later at Chattanooga’s Forest Hills Cemetery, near the foot of Lookout Mountain, site of the Ku Klux Klan’s first postwar cross-burning. Several hundred admirers turned out to honor their fallen hero.³⁰

The death of the four godfathers of postwar White Supremacy did not signal the end of what they had been trying to achieve for decades. At the time of his demise, Stoner was revered by at least 99 fascist groups in the United States: they included 23 overt Nazi organizations with 119 chapters in 46 states, 58 “white nationalist” cliques active in 29 states, and 18 Nazi skinhead gangs with loyalists in 35 states. He was also admired by 21 Christian Identity “ministries” and 97 chapters of 8 competing neo-Confederate groups that still called for secession.³¹

Stoner’s death marked the culmination of an era but not of a movement. It was time for a new generation to take over. His captains and lieutenants, as well as those of Emory Burke, George Lincoln Rockwell, and James Madole, continued the struggle for White Supremacy well into the twenty-first century, a struggle that would lead to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Epilogue: We’ve Always Been Here

Emory Burke, Jesse B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell shaped the immediate course of the postwar far right, but by the last quarter of the twentieth century many of their supporters had embarked in new directions. A militia movement begun by their captains and lieutenants in the 1970s and ’80s blossomed over the next several decades as increasingly sophisticated far-right groups used computers, social media, violence, and entry into the Republican Party to put forth the issues they had been advocating since 1945. Unlike Burke, Stoner, Madole, and Rockwell, whose organizations always struggled to gain significant numbers, during the first Trump administration their far-right successors had an advocate in the White House who embraced them as patriots and not as insurrectionists seeking to overthrow a legitimately elected president.

After spending so much time on fifty years of history, I would not presume to analyze the subsequent several decades in a brief epilogue. Instead, I propose to revisit some of the themes raised in the previous chapters and see how they played out over the following years.

In American football and basketball, sports writers often talk about a “coach’s tree.” That is, certain coaches are known for mentoring younger coaches who go on to lead their own teams and, in turn, mentor a new generation of successors. The same held true for the far right. Burke, Stoner, Madole, and Rockwell had generated a “White Supremacists’ tree.” Many of the men who had apprenticed with them went on to start their own racist and antisemitic groups. Acknowledging the failure of their mentors to create a viable third party, these lifelong activists abandoned traditional politics in favor of creating a series of militia and patriotic groups that advocated many of the same ideas as their fathers and grandfathers had. Like their relatives who returned from World War II, many militiamen were veterans who had fought in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, or Iraq and returned home alienated and feeling their country had betrayed them. Family farms were being foreclosed on, and industrial jobs that paid well were leaving the country. Government aid programs helped Blacks and minorities, they contended, but did little to help white men and women who suffered for no fault of their own.

In the decades from the late 1970s to the 2020s, the militia and patriot movements went through three main phases. The first lasted from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s and was characterized by self-isolation in hospitable white parts of the country. The second phase overlapped with the first and lasted from the late 1970s until the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was marked by increased antigovernment rhetoric and violence. The third phase began in reaction to Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign and continues to today. All three phases shared several core values: a belief that the federal government had become the enemy of the people; a deep conviction that Jews, Blacks, immigrants, and people of color would soon destroy America by outnumbering the white population; conspiratorial fears that outside international forces would create a new world order that would destroy American sovereignty; and the use of Christian Identity to legitimize their beliefs as religiously motivated reflections of God’s will and not as mere prejudice.¹

The new generation of activists pursued a different path than their predecessors. William Potter Gale and Richard Girnt Butler did not care about elections or seeking high office. Both men had been ministers in Wesley Swift’s Christian Identity Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Unwilling to compromise their beliefs, they created the two most important militias of the 1970s and 1980s, the Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations. After splitting with Gale in 1974, “Reverend” Butler, a former Lockheed Aircraft engineer who had worked with Burke, Stoner, and Rockwell, urged all far-right groups to move to the Pacific Northwest, adopt Christian Identity, and create a separate White nation where their followers could lead independent lives free from the perversions of multiculturalism.

The Aryan Nations differed from previous nationalist organizations in two key ways: an emphasis on self-isolation and a political agenda that went far beyond racist and antisemitic screeds. A longtime admirer of Adolf Hitler, Richard Girnt Butler wanted to turn the Pacific Northwest into a “Territorial Sanctuary” for assembling white Americans “under their own government . . . with no Jews, Blacks or people of color.” To that end, he relocated to Hayden Lake, Idaho, where the local county’s population was 98 percent white and included only 39 Black residents, 197 Asians, 753 Hispanics, 467 Native Americans, and half a dozen Jews.²

Butler’s self-sustaining community articulated a series of ideas that would resonate with militia and patriotic movements well into the twenty-first century. Long before neo-Nazi demonstrators at Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “The Jews Will Not Replace Us” in August 2017, Butler offered his own version of the great replacement theory. His “Declaration of War Against ‘the ZOG’” claimed that the Zionist Occupation Government planned to destroy the white race by aborting white babies, admitting unlimited numbers of nonwhite immigrants, and promoting interracial marriages. Butler began preparing for war against a corrupt government that gave too much power to Jews and Blacks. Both needed to be marginalized, if not eliminated.³

Having witnessed the inability of White Supremacists to unite around a single leader or program, Butler organized an annual World Congress of Aryan Nations that brought together upwards of 200 far-right activists from the United States, Canada, and Europe to discuss current and future activities. By the end of the 1980s, the Aryan Nations, according to one observer, had emerged as “the most powerful voice in the white supremacist movement, and its influence was felt across the breadth of the United States.”⁴

Like his predecessors, Butler wanted to rid the country of its internal enemies and to create a better future for the Aryans who had built Western civilization. During the 1960s, he had watched George Lincoln Rockwell use the mass media to draw attention to his political cause. Two decades later, Butler went a step further by launching a weekly radio broadcast called The Aryan Nations Hour and establishing the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, a pioneering computer network that allowed for direct communication with like-minded groups throughout the world. As one website posting noted, “We believe that there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children of light (Yahweh, The Everlasting God), the Aryan Race, the true Israel of the bible. Revelations 12:10–11.”⁵

Butler hoped his repeated emphasis on immigration restriction and ending abortion would appeal to the rapidly growing number of Christian evangelicals. By 1979, evangelicals were running 1,000 Christian radio stations and twenty-five religiously controlled TV outlets. Murray Friedman, who tracked far-right extremists for the American Jewish Committee, warned that fifty million evangelical Protestants “were emerging from isolation and making their impact felt in the social and political arenas.”⁶

Determined to train a new generation of activists, Butler founded the Aryan Nations Academy in the early 1980s. He also sought the support of some of the nation’s most marginalized men: skinheads and prisoners. Butler saw the former as a powerful group of potential young allies. By 1993, they numbered 3,500 spread across forty states and were responsible for at least forty-one murders. He also organized White Power prison gangs known as the Aryan Brotherhood, who were involved in loan sharking, gambling, extortion, and gun and drug trafficking. A substantial portion of their illicit profits were sent to Aryan Nations headquarters as religious offerings.⁷

By the early 1990s, Aryan Nations membership had swelled to an estimated 15,000 followers spread out over eighteen states. But Butler never realized his dream of creating an independent all-white nation. In 1998, Aryan Nations security guards attacked mother and son Victoria and Jason Keenan outside its compound. Two years later, after a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a jury ordered the Aryan Nations to pay the Keenans $6.3 million. The judgment bankrupted the group and forced Butler to sell the compound to pay off the debt. Butler remained in Hayden Lake after a wealthy admirer bought him a home.⁸

Phase one of the militia movement ended with the fragmentation of the Aryan Nations and the reemergence of an issue that had plagued the far right since 1945: the “too many führers problem.” Once again, ego and factionalism superseded the desire for unity. Each of Butler’s captains believed they knew more than their mentor. His designated successors, Ray Redfeairn and August Kreis, broke with him in the early 1990s and founded their own group in Pennsylvania. Likewise, after clashing with Butler in 1993, chief of staff Carl Franklin and security head Wayne Jones left with numerous members to form the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian of Montana. John and David Trochmann admired Butler but believed the Aryan Nations needed to embrace greater violence to achieve its ends. The brothers left the Hayden Lake compound to organize the Militia of Montana, soon to become one of the most active antigovernment groups in the country. Other former members created break-off factions in Idaho, Ohio, and North Carolina.⁹

As more of Butler’s inner circle deserted him, membership continued shrinking, as did attendance at the once highly influential World Congress of Aryan Nations. By the time Butler died in September 2004, his organization had lost more than half its members, most of its key leaders, and nearly all its influence.¹⁰

The Aryan Nations inspired a second phase in the evolution of militia and patriotic movements characterized by a strident antigovernment ideology, a belief in Christian Identity, the idea of a “leaderless revolution,” and a turn to more extreme violence. This phase was marked by heightened condemnations of federal tyranny and a determination to launch armed rebellions if necessary. During the Reagan administration, many citizens came to see federal power as the enemy of ordinary Americans. Extremists were encouraged by President Ronald Reagan’s insistence that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” As Reagan warned in his 1980 inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”¹¹

Reagan’s brand of conservatism proved too moderate for most militia units. White Supremacists of the 1980s and ’90s envisioned a radical future that could only be achieved through direct action; a future that would remedy the ill effects of unemployment, growing wealth inequality, and a lack of economic mobility for white men; a future that would bring radical changes in policies surrounding immigration, welfare, abortion, feminism, busing, and gay and lesbian rights.¹²

The neo-Nazi National Alliance and its radical spinoff the Order emerged as the two most important militia groups of the late twentieth century, and William Luther Pierce as the far right’s most influential leader. Born in Atlanta to a Presbyterian family in 1933, Pierce earned a PhD in physics at the University of Colorado in 1962 and then taught at Oregon State University for several years. Academics proved too confining for the professor who considered Adolf Hitler to be “the greatest man of our era.” In 1966, Pierce moved to Arlington, Virginia, where he joined the American Nazi Party and edited its ideological quarterly, the National Socialist World.¹³

After Rockwell’s assassination, Pierce worked with his successor Matthew Koehl, who had served as James Madole’s security chief in the early 1950s. Pierce broke with Koehl in 1970 after the latter refused to resign when confronted with evidence of his homosexuality and having a Jewish mother. Four years later, after a brief stint with the neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance, Pierce formed the National Alliance. In 1985, he moved his operation to a 346-acre farm near Mill Point, West Virginia.¹⁴

Like the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance (NA) attracted antigovernment activists, antisemites, and White Supremacists to its compound. Pierce hoped to recruit “a fresh cast of educated, middle-class bigots,” the kind of people who had joined the John Birch Society but ultimately felt it did not go far enough in its racial policies. NA members ranged in age from eighteen to their nineties, with the bulk in their early twenties. “We get people spread over the whole spectrum,” Pierce boasted. “We have university professors, writers, and artists. We have engineers and teachers, and we have unemployed truck drivers.” Some 80 percent of those members were male and 20 percent female.¹⁵

Long before Donald Trump, Pierce articulated his own version of the great replacement theory. “The birthrate for our people is way below the replacement level,” he warned. Unless patriots addressed the problem immediately, colored minorities would become a majority of the population and white America would be headed toward extinction. Pierce used the National Alliance compound to “train a new generation to pick up the torch and become warriors for our cause . . . the fitness of our race for survival.”¹⁶

Pierce and his followers were far more militant in calling for violence to achieve “a racially clean area of the earth” than those participating in the first phase of the militia movement. Members were instructed to arm themselves but to keep guns and ammunition hidden in case authorities came for them. Harking back to Jesse B. Stoner’s Anti-Jewish parties, the National Alliance demanded the complete extermination of Jews and other nonwhite races, the execution of white sympathizers, and the creation of an all-white homeland. “We must have new societies throughout the white worlds which are based on Aryan values and are compatible with the Aryan nature,” Pierce insisted.¹⁷

The National Alliance denounced the growth of mass democracy and the enfranchisement of women and nonwhites. They saw feminism as a threat to motherhood and the survival of the white race. A “woman’s battlefield is the maternity ward,” they argued, and her “greatest ‘diploma’ is to give birth to the ‘superman’ or ‘superwoman.’” Pierce glorified violence as the ultimate solution to “the Jewish problem.” Once in power, they would encourage policies that led to a complete “ethnic cleansing” of nonwhites. Pierce promised to “‘lock Jews, race traitors and other enemies of the ‘Aryan’ race into cattle cars and send them to the bottom of abandoned coal mines.”¹⁸

While Rockwell hoped to reach a mass audience through publicity stunts, Pierce disseminated his ideas through multiple media platforms: periodicals such as the National Vanguard and National Alliance Bulletin, a radio program called American Dissident Voices, an early internet site, and a music company he purchased from skinheads, Resistance Records, that emphasized white pride and racial separateness. All forms of communication were filled with diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and the government. American Dissident Voices was aired on local stations in Arkansas, Texas, New England, Florida, and California and claimed upward of 12,000 listeners a day. All programs could be downloaded on the National Alliance’s website.¹⁹

By 1998, the Anti-Defamation League labeled the National Alliance “the single most dangerous organized hate group in the United States today.” It had 1,000 violent members in twenty-six states stretching from coast to coast, which made it the largest and most dangerous neo-Nazi group in the country. Four years later, the FBI labeled the NA “the best financed and best-organized white nationalist organization of its kind in the country,” with an estimated membership of 2,500 and annual income of $1 million.²⁰

Pierce’s most important contribution to the militia movement, one that continues to this day, was his infamous novel The Turner Diaries. Published in 1978 under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, his book offered a blueprint for executing a successful race war.

Set in the late 1990s, the plot is centered around the future discovery of Earl Turner’s diaries. Turner is a soldier in a White Supremacy army called the Organization. When the Jewish-controlled government known as the System confiscates all firearms under the recently passed Cohen Act, white patriots launch a guerrilla war. After Turner proves his mettle by blowing up an FBI building, he advances through the ranks and is inducted into the Organization’s violent inner circle known as the Order. When the government implements a series of repressive anti-white laws, members of this revolutionary group inaugurate a campaign of resistance, assassination, and sabotage throughout the country. The diary ends as Turner prepares to fly a small plane loaded with a sixty-kiloton nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. An afterword describes how the Organization used nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to launch a successful worldwide revolution that led to the systematic extermination of Blacks, Jews, and minorities.²¹

Pierce concludes the novel by exulting how “just 110 years after the birth of the Great One [Hitler], the dream of a white world finally became a certainty . . . and the Order would spread its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come.”²²

The Turner Diaries emerged as the bible of the American far right and the Mein Kampf of its day. National Alliance members were required to read the book and by 2000, it had sold an estimated 500,000 copies. The Turner Diaries inspired the creation of a neo-Nazi terrorist offshoot in 1983 known as the Order (also called the Brüder Schweigen or Silent Brotherhood). Taking its name from Pierce’s novel, the Christian Identity group was founded by Robert Mathews, a National Alliance recruiter and Christian Identity protégé of Richard Butler. The Order attracted militant supporters from the Aryan Nations, National Alliance, and Ku Klux Klan. Members took an oath to protect the white race and work toward creating an all-white homeland in Pacific Northwest.²³

Declaring themselves God’s “battle ax and weapons of war,” Mathews’s Christian warriors pledged their lives “to do whatever is necessary to deliver our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race.” Order acolytes vowed “not to lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea and reclaimed the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and through our blood and His will, becomes the land of our children to be.” Their end goal, declared one member, “was the annihilation of the Jewish race,” the race responsible for organizing all other nonwhites and non-Christians.²⁴

To prepare for the eventual attack on the government, Order members went to Hayden Lake to train in hand-to-hand combat and use of submachine guns that could fire 900 rounds a minute. They also established a second military boot camp in an Idaho forest far away from prying federal eyes. From October 1983 until December 1984, Order acolytes funded their operations through a series of bank robberies, armored car thefts, and counterfeiting operations that raised over $4 million. Within a short time, the Order established itself as “the most dangerous underground group since the Ku Klux Klan.”²⁵

In June 1984, the Order attracted national attention when David Lane and Bruce Pierce pumped a dozen shots from a .45 caliber MAC-10 submachine into the body of Colorado radio show host Alan Berg, whose repeated mocking of White Supremacists had infuriated them. Six months later, an FBI manhunt and subsequent shootout with federal agents led to the death of its leader, Robert Mathews, who was burned alive in his Whidbey Island home.²⁶

The following spring, a federal grand jury issued a twenty-one-count indictment against twenty-three members of the Order, alleging the group constituted a criminal enterprise. In February 1987, a Seattle jury convicted ten Order members (nine men and one woman) of a series of violent acts, including murder, and sentenced them to 40 to 100 years in prison. The Order was soon brought down by the FBI’s infiltration efforts in “Operation Clean Sweep.”²⁷

The arrest and prosecution of the Order members angered countless White Supremacists. They grew even more concerned as myriad federal agencies embarked on a deadly campaign to clamp down on far-right militia and patriotic groups. In April 1986, authorities took control of a paramilitary camp in Arkansas run by a Christian Identity antigovernment group known as the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. In addition to finding a munitions factory and an extensive cache of arms, they discovered cyanide intended to poison the water supply of a major city. Federal officials went after similar groups in Missouri, Texas, Montana, and California.²⁸

By the end of the 1980s, watchdog groups placed the number of people in far-right movements like the Aryan Nations, National Alliance, and Ku Klux Klan at over 20,000. More frightening was the growing number of people who began paying attention to their antigovernment rhetoric. Observers estimated that an additional 150,000 to 175,000 Americans attended events or sent donations, while another 450,000 read their literature but were not active participants.²⁹

A new era of deadly government action against far-right groups led to a decentralized phase in the militia movement. Following the end of spying by the AJC and ANL, and the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, the FBI—aided by the Southern Poverty Law Center, KlanWatch, and the ADL—became the prime investigators of the far right and used federal anti-racketeering laws to suppress a range of militia and White Supremacist movements. Over the next several decades, Bureau agents succeeded in planting undercover operatives and agents provocateurs inside the most radical groups, turning current members into informants, and sending leaders to jail.³⁰

To counter what they saw as government overreach in infiltrating patriotic groups and assassinating men like Robert Mathews, far-right activists embraced The Turner Diaries’ concept of a “leaderless resistance.” Vietnam veteran Louis Beam, who helped create the Aryan Nations Liberty Net computer system, was the driving force behind advancing this new strategy. The traditional pyramid model of organization with a small number of leaders at the top and masses of members at the bottom, Beam argued, was no longer effective. “Anti-state, political organizations utilizing this method of command and control,” he wrote in 1992, “are easy prey for government infiltration, entrapment, and destruction of the personnel involved.”³¹

Beam called upon underground groups to embrace the idea of a decentralized resistance movement. He urged patriots to form small “phantom cells” in which each man or woman would be capable of independent activity without direct contact with or approval from headquarters. “Leaderless resistance” made every activist their own führer and, in turn made it more difficult to shut down a movement by arresting its leaders. Under this decentralized system, those committed to freedom would “act when they feel the time is ripe, or [would] take their cue from others who precede them.”³²

To make communication among geographically scattered individuals easier, Beam created a series of code-word-accessed message boards on the Aryan Nations’ Liberty Net that allowed activists around the country to communicate with each other without fear of leaving a paper trail. The “great minds of the patriotic Christian movement,” Beam bragged, were now “linked together and joined to one computer. Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access these minds.”³³

Beam and his allies embraced violence to stop the country from moving into a “long dark night of police state tyranny.” They called on cells to launch “a thousand points of resistance” against their enemies: Jews, Blacks, and, most of all, federal authorities. Those enemies needed to be eliminated. “Over here, if you kill the enemy, you go to jail,” the former helicopter gunner told a reporter. “Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they gave you a medal. I couldn’t see the difference.”³⁴

Three violent incidents moved these antigovernment movements from the shadows into the forefront of national attention: the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992, the Waco siege in 1993, and the bombing of an Oklahoma federal building in 1995.

On August 21, 1992, six U.S. marshals dressed in military camouflage and equipped with M16 rifles went to arrest Randy Weaver at his mountaintop cabin near Ruby Ridge Creek, Idaho, for failure to appear on federal firearms charges. The Vietnam veteran and Identity Christian had moved his family to the Aryan Nations area in 1983 and embraced many of their ideas about a malevolent government that continually abrogated the rights of its citizens. When federal marshals shot the Weavers’ Labrador retriever as he ran toward them, the embattled household returned fire, killing marshal William Degan. Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, died in the subsequent shootout.

The next day, 300 neighbors and White Power activists, including Vietnam vets in camouflage fatigues and skinheads in combat boots, descended upon the cabin to show their support. When the Weavers refused to surrender, an overwhelming force of heavily armed FBI agents, U.S. marshals, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents launched a violent siege in which Weaver’s wife, Vicki, was shot to death while holding her ten-month-old daughter. Several days later, with an angry crowd of sympathizers looking on, Weaver surrendered to authorities. During a subsequent trial, Weaver was acquitted of all siege-related charges. The family filed a civil suit against the federal government and won a settlement of $3.1 million.³⁵

White Supremacists were outraged after a second confrontation, this time in Waco, Texas. In February 1993, suspecting that a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians were stockpiling a large cache of illegal weapons, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents descended on leader David Koresh’s ranch. Tipped off in advance about the raid and plans to arrest Koresh, heavily armed group members engaged in a firefight that resulted in the death of four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians. After a standoff that lasted fifty-one days and seized the nation’s headlines, the FBI mounted an incendiary tear gas attack to force the defiant members out of their compound. During the subsequent battle, a fire broke out in which seventy-six Davidians, including nearly two dozen children, burned to death.³⁶

The excessive violence at Ruby Ridge and Waco confirmed what far-right groups had feared for decades: that one day the government would turn its full forces against citizens whose only crime was asking to be left alone to live and worship as they saw fit. In the wake of what they considered to be federal murder, diverse right-wing extremists shifted the focus of their attacks from Jews and Blacks to rabid denunciations of the government. Many on the far right now began believing long-standing conspiracy theories that the government was being manipulated by malevolent behind-the-scenes internationalist forces (usually meaning Jews) who wanted to create a “New World Order.” Jews and their allies planned to seize weapons from private citizens and replace venerated traditions of self-governance with a one-world government operated by the United Nations that would enslave the Aryan population.

Men and women who had not previously belonged to militias now vowed to take up arms and fight a government that no longer represented most citizens. Turning those vows into action did not take long. The right fought back symbolically and literally by blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco siege. The bombing was not led by any organization but by army veteran Timothy McVeigh, a member of the “leaderless resistance” who, aided by Terry Nichols, wound up killing 168 people (including 19 children), injuring 680, damaging 324 buildings, and causing $652 million in property destruction. To this day, the bombing remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.³⁷

McVeigh acted without orders from movement leaders, but his plan for destruction came directly out of The Turner Diaries. The novel described the bombing of a federal building by a 5,000-pound truck bomb filled with ammonium nitrate almost identical to that used in the Oklahoma event. Turner justifies the subsequent death by arguing “there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people . . . And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us. . . the whole race will die.” Following the bombing, FBI agents found passages from The Turner Diaries in McVeigh’s car.³⁸

Timothy McVeigh was part of a generation of Gulf War veterans who returned home feeling their country had betrayed them. When the twenty-six-year-old former armored tank sergeant drove his car bomb into the federal building, he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Thomas Jefferson’s warning that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.” McVeigh later defended his actions, insisting, “I wanted the government to hurt like the people of Waco and Ruby Ridge had.” He called the dead children at Oklahoma “collateral damage” of a military action and noted how “in Desert Storm I got medals for killing people.” Now, he was imprisoned for the same kind of action. Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection in June 2001.39

While most Americans were shocked by the callous murder of so many innocent men, women, and children, far-right leaders greeted the event with jubilation. Ten days after the bombing, Turner Diaries author William Pierce predicted that growing resentment of Jews, politicians, homosexuals, minorities, and “female executives” by “normal Americans” would lead to antigovernment terrorism “on a scale that the world has never seen before.”⁴⁰

The three events occupied national headlines for weeks and were dramatized in several television movies and miniseries. They also sparked a dramatic rise in membership among right-wing groups. In 1990, the ADL and Klan Watch estimated the number of men and women belonging to all hate groups at 20,000. By 1996, watchdog agencies estimated that 346 militia and patriotic citizens’ groups operated in 40 states with as many as 5 million activists and sympathizers. “Extremists today,” the ADL observed, “depict America as an occupied country, the besieged victim of conspiracies instituted by sinister secretive elites.”⁴¹

Following the Oklahoma tragedy, federal and state authorities acted with unprecedented alacrity to shut down militia movements throughout the country. Paramilitary groups such as the Ohio Unorganized Militia, the Georgia Republic Militia, the Oklahoma Constitutional Militia, the Mountaineer Militia of West Virginia, the Washington State Militia, the Montana Freemen, and the Georgia Republic Militia were charged with illegal possession of weapons, including bombs. More frightening yet, militia members from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were accused of planning to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center in an action taken directly from The Turner Diaries. Many of these groups adopted the “sovereign citizens” concept preached by the Posse Comitatus and refused to pay taxes, arguing that they were not citizens of the United States and therefore not required to follow most laws.⁴²

The antigovernment animus that dominated the far right during the last quarter of the twentieth century was placed on hold after the horrific events of September 11, 2001. Just as the bombing of Pearl Harbor had led the Ku Klux Klan to suspend attacks on minorities for the duration of the war, so, too, did the events of that September day turn the focus of far-right anger from the federal government and internal threats to the external dangers posed by foreign Muslim radicals. Militia movements began losing members as 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror temporarily decreased antigovernment sentiments. The suspension of hostilities did not last long.

The third phase in the self-proclaimed patriotic movements began during the run-up to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign of 2008. Members of the Birther Movement, whose most notable figure was New York real-estate developer and reality television star Donald Trump, raised a series of false accusations claiming Obama was a Muslim who had been born in Africa and therefore was ineligible to run for the presidency. The subsequent election of the country’s first Black chief executive, along with the Great Recession of 2008 and rising numbers of nonwhite immigrants, inaugurated a new era of nativism, racism, and Islamophobia.

Extremist leaders once again claimed that Jews were planning to bring down the global financial system and initiate a New World Order. They warned that Muslim Obama and his fellow Marxist Democrats would stop citizens from defending themselves by confiscating their guns. Far-right leaders forged broad alliances that brought together tax protestors, anti-abortionists, racists, Christian nationalists, survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and those who hated the intrusive power of the federal government. Following Obama’s election, the number of registered users on White Supremacist websites tripled to more than 300,000 while the number of “patriot” groups rose from 149 to 1,360.43

By the early twenty-first century, the Southern Poverty Law Center was tracking nearly two dozen broad categories of antigovernment and hate groups, with dozens of individual organizations listed within each category. A “majority of domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated,” FBI director Christopher Wray reported in July 2019, “are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”⁴⁴

Among the many new extremist organizations, three played a key role in the Capitol Insurrection of January 6, 2021: the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys. The groups shared several long-standing core beliefs: internationalist conspiracies were threatening to destroy American sovereignty; demographic changes brought about by the higher birth rates and the influx of nonwhites were leading to the destruction of America; and a “Muslim” president who was planning to seize all firearms and replace democracy with socialism. These groups contained large numbers of disillusioned military veterans angered by the seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that had offered little benefit to soldiers, democracy, or Americans at home.

Like the Columbians, the National Renaissance Party, and the National States Rights Party, the Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys saw themselves as American patriots determined to save their nation from those who would destroy it. Founded in the wake of Barack Obama’s election, the Three Percenters took their name from the false claim that only 3 percent of colonists had taken up arms against the Crown during the American Revolution. They believed that a small number of armed individuals could overthrow a tyrannical government that was destroying citizens’ basic rights. Claiming to represent the will of the “founding fathers,” the Three Percenters were composed of former and current military personnel, police, and trained first responders who pledged to “stand up and fight if our rights are infringed in any way.” As their website explained: “The States are losing control, federal judges are overruling the people, liberals and Democrats are determined to disarm citizens, and the political climate is aggressive and leaning toward socialism.”⁴⁵

Many Three Percenters also belonged to the larger Oath Keepers. Like the former group, Oath Keepers attracted military veterans, law enforcement personnel, and first responders. Declaring that their allegiance was “to the Constitution, not to politicians,” they pledged to refuse any unconstitutional orders given by corrupt government officials “to disarm the American people, to conduct warrantless searches, or to detain Americans as ‘enemy combatants’ in violation of their ancient right to jury trial.”⁴⁶

These were seemingly respectable citizens led by educated leaders. The Oath Keepers were founded in 2009 by Elmer Stewart Rhodes, an army veteran, Montana attorney, and Yale Law School graduate. To gain greater numbers of followers, Rhodes and his cohort focused their animus on government overreach and its cooperation with shadowy groups trying to strip Americans of their basic rights. By 2016, the Oath Keepers’ self-proclaimed 30,000 to 35,000 dues-paying members (monitoring groups placed it closer to 5,000) were scattered across every state and, following the practice of leaderless resistance, acted alone whenever they saw fit.⁴⁷

Insisting that the Democratic Party had become a Marxist–Islamist front under Obama, Oath Keepers allied themselves with the GOP’s far-right Tea Party wing in 2009–10. Both warned supporters of a secret plan to flood the nation with undocumented immigrants who would vote en masse for Democrats. To stop that from happening, Rhodes saw violence as a legitimate political activity and urged members to form “civilization preservation cells” that would engage in paramilitary training and stockpile food and weapons in anticipation of a potential civil war.⁴⁸

The Proud Boys were the least ideological and most violent of the new far right. They adopted Jesse Stoner’s belief in the efficacy of violence with one alteration: they preferred street brawls to bombs. Like Madole and Rockwell’s storm troopers, Proud Boys liked wearing uniforms; but instead of Nazi-like attire that turned off many Americans, they adopted a hipper, more modern outfit consisting of a classic black Fred Perry polo shirt with yellow striping. Not wishing to have its brand associated with the far right, the Fred Perry company stopped selling its black-and-yellow polo shirts in the United States.⁴⁹

Launched in 2016 by Vice Media cofounder and radio commentator Gavin McInnes, the group took its name from the song “Proud of Your Boy,” featured in the Disney film Aladdin. The name was ironic. McInnes and his minions interpreted Aladdin as apologizing for being a boy. Voicing disdain for multiculturalism and gender sensitivity, McInnes described the Proud Boys as a “pro-western fraternity” and drinking club dedicated to male bonding, socializing, and the preservation of Western culture. They were proud to be misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic, anti-immigrant, and violent. Like the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, they believed the illegal influx of immigrants was destroying the American way of life. “I don’t want our culture diluted,” McInnes told the New York Times. “We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”⁵⁰

The Proud Boys were more a street gang looking for a fight than a deeply ideological militia movement. They were thugs who showed up at demonstrations drunk, wearing army surplus gear, football pads, and hard-shell baseball helmets, ready to fight. “I want violence. I want punching in the face,” McInnes told supporters. During demonstrations, the Proud Boys used American flags and beer cans as lethal weapons against their enemies: liberals, Jews, Blacks, socialists, antifa (antifascists), Black Lives Matter supporters, and anyone openly anti-MAGA.⁵¹

These three groups were the most visible tip of the far-right iceberg. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and antigovernment groups rose to 1,400, an eight-fold increase since Obama’s election. Many of the men who joined these groups were veterans who, like their counterparts in 1945, returned from war prepared to return to war.⁵²

The 2016 presidential election proved a milestone for the far right. Since 1945, extremist movements had been continually weakened by the “too many führers problem.” Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and subsequent presidency marked a turning point in their fortunes. There was now a single führer who moved militia movements and far-right Christian nationalists from the margins to the mainstream. They now had an ally in the White House. For them, Trump was a gift from God: a strong white Aryan autocrat who shared the same ideas and fears as they did; an ally who praised them as patriots and openly called for their help to Make America Great Again.⁵³

Unlike the four godfathers of White Supremacy, Trump was never a deeply committed ideologue. He adopted the ideas, rhetoric, and conspiracy theories of his far-right supporters and made them a central part of his presidential campaign, focusing his attacks on a Black president and Democratic Party that were part of a Marxist–socialist plot to destroy America; a corrupt Congress that permitted nonwhite immigrants to flood the country; and a government that no longer pursued the interests of its working-class citizens.

Trump knew how to appeal to the prejudices and paranoid fantasies of his allies and make them sound like patriotic efforts to save the nation. Truth was less important than belief. He relied on slogans, insults, and conspiracy theories that he repeated over and over again until the unreal became real—at least to his supporters. Once he saw how effective his diatribes against immigrants and Muslims could be, he made them a major component of his campaign and subsequent presidency. Trump may have been a scoundrel, but he was their scoundrel and a hell of a lot better than the mainstream political scoundrels who had ruled Washington, D.C., forever.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that the election would be rigged and called on supporters for help. The Oath Keepers responded by sending members to polling stations that November to ensure the left did not steal the election. The American Nazi Party also united around the former game show host. “Trump has had the balls or the gall, to REACH OUT to the true feelings of most of what is left of White America, and ‘say the things they have longed to hear for decades’—he has brought them out from under the stones where they have been HIDING, and given them a VOICE to vent at last.” The Proud Boys attended Trump’s rallies intoxicated, wearing MAGA hats and ready to fight.⁵⁴

Prior to Trump’s electoral victory, the bulk of militia and patriotic groups operated largely in the shadows of public consciousness. That changed after the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The setting was new but the goal was the same as it had been since the late 1940s: to unite a fragmented American right in a common set of goals with a common set of leaders. Those attending the two-day protest included Three Percenters, Proud Boys, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, neo-Confederates, Klansmen, and members of the alt-right. Their coalition was determined to stop the removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from a city park. Violence broke out on August 11 as counterdemonstrators clashed with nationalists chanting “The Jews Will Not Replace Us.” The next day, White Supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into the crowd, killing one woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring thirty-five men and women.⁵⁵

The far-right groups marching that day preached an apocalyptic version of “race suicide” (also known as the great replacement theory), arguing that Jews were plotting to replace white people with colored immigrants. They played on long-standing fears that immigrants were having more babies than white people, which would lead to the ultimate destruction of the white race. When Trump declared that many immigrants came from “shithole countries,” he was echoing Christian Identity thought that considered nonwhites to be less than human.⁵⁶

President Donald Trump denounced the “display of hatred, bigotry, and violence” at Charlottesville, but then added that there were “very fine people on both sides.” This was the first time that a sitting U.S. president condoned the violent activities of racists and antisemites and drew a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and antifascists. Trump’s apparent endorsement emboldened extremists and allowed them to ramp up their recruiting efforts. In 1999, the Southern Poverty Law Center had identified 457 hate groups in the United States. Following Trump’s election, those numbers rose to 917 in 2016, 954 in 2017, and 1,020 in 2018.57

The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys attracted considerable media attention by providing “security” for allegedly embattled businesses and citizens during Black Lives Matter and antifa protests over the killing of George Floyd in 2020. The Proud Boys served as Trump’s personal Hell’s Angels, beating up any demonstrators who opposed him. Oath Keepers, then numbering between 1,000 and 5,000 members, took to Twitter to join President Trump’s denunciations of a “deep-state” conspiracy in which a network of self-serving bureaucrats within the federal government was seeking to forge an alternative government bent on undermining the president and his policies.⁵⁸

As the 2020 elections approached, Trump and his militia supporters once again warned of a Marxist–socialist plot to steal the election. Similar warnings had been issued in the past. What differed this time was the realization of a fear that ADL, AJC, and ANL leaders all had expressed in 1945: that one day previously divided extremists would figure out a way to unite in a common set of actions. By 2020, dozens of old and new groups and militias were using the dark web, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and social media sites to communicate with one another on a near instantaneous basis. In the thirty days before January 6, 2021, the term “Storm the Capitol” was mentioned 100,000 times on internet postings and viral tweet threads.⁵⁹

When voters elected Joseph Biden to the presidency in November 2020, Trump urged his followers to “save our democracy” by rejecting “a fake election” and warned that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” “We will never give up,” he added. “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” Far-right activists responded to his plea to “Stop the Steal” by planning an attack on the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.⁶⁰

On January 6, after weeks of constant online coordination between Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, some 2,000 to 2,500 self-proclaimed patriots, many carrying weapons and wearing body armor, stormed the U.S. Capitol, vandalizing, looting, and assaulting police. They erected gallows just west of the Capitol where the Proud Boys planned to hang Vice President Mike Pence if he refused to overturn the election results. Among the demonstrators were Christian nationalists who carried “Jesus 2020” flags and wore shirts proclaiming FAITH. FAMILY. FREEDOM.⁶¹

In the wake of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, many militias and patriot movements saw violence as a legitimate political response to a corrupt government that had stolen the election from the only person who could save the country. If they were killed or arrested storming the Capitol, it would be a small price to pay. Trump urged supporters to descend on the Capitol, using “Stop the Steal” as a rallying cry. Rather than condemn their subsequent violence, he applauded them as patriots and promised to pardon anyone jailed for participating in the so-called insurrection.⁶²

Order was finally restored late that evening, and the electoral vote count certifying Joseph Biden as the winner was completed early the next morning. A week after the attack, the House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection. On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted him on four charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States, witness tampering, conspiracy against the rights of citizens, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding. Subsequent investigations led to the arrest and conviction of key protest organizers. By May 2024, 1,424 demonstrators had been charged with federal crimes. Of the 1,010 who pled guilty, 678 received jail terms. Proud Boys members accounted for the highest number of extremist arrestees. Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes were sentenced to twenty-two years and eighteen-years, respectively, for seditious conspiracy. The ensuing leadership vacuum was quickly filled by their captains and lieutenants.⁶³

Movements come and movements go, leaders come and leaders go, but ideas persist forever. The Capitol insurrection was eventually put down, but the men and women who attacked the center of democracy remained unrepentant. During the subsequent proceedings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republican representative Liz Cheney broke with her party to place the blame for the insurrection on Donald Trump. “The President of the United States summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”⁶⁴

Placing the blame for January 6 solely on Trump ignores the long history of right-wing extremism, antisemitism, racism, anti-federalism, and anti-immigrant feelings. The men and women who marched on the Capitol were motivated by many of the same ideas and grudges that had motivated veterans returning from World War II. Like their fathers and grandfathers, they saw themselves as patriots saving the nation from those who would destroy it. More than a third of the January 6th demonstrators were military veterans who had proudly served their country. They and their predecessors had risked their lives fighting for their country long before Trump and will continue doing so long after he leaves the political scene. As many of the men and women who marched on the Capitol might have said, “We have always been here, we will always be here.”

Hate has always been with us but so has the rejection of hate. Far-right extremists ultimately proved too radical for the vast bulk of ordinary citizens. Whether it was in the streets of New York City during the early 1950s or marching in Nashville in July 2024, Americans do not like to see demonstrators dressed in Nazi uniforms or men dressed in Fred Perry polo shirts beating up bystanders solely because of their race or religion. Milton Ellerin, who spent decades monitoring extremist movements for the FBI and the American Jewish Committee, observed how throughout their history, extremist groups have “failed to develop a motivating philosophy” or serious political agenda that addressed “the concerns of blue-collar workers or the middle class, their only sources of recruits to date.” Whether in 1945 or 2021, none of these extremist leaders has offered viable solutions “to the problem of inflation, unemployment, the quality of life, crime in the streets, environment, taxes, wages, or foreign policy.”⁶⁵

The key danger of decades of persistent hate, Ellerin concluded, was “not that it has the capacity to engulf Americans or capture our government and its institutions. Rather, the concern is and should be with its harmful effects on emotionally unstable or zealous adherents who act on the built-up hatreds it inspires. That is a danger for all Americans to think about.”⁶⁶

The warning Ellerin sounded in November 1977 remains true to this day. According to one major monitoring agency, “there are active militia groups in every state of the United States and membership in the thousands.” Ellerin also echoed a second fear expressed by James Sheldon, Arnold Forster, and George Mintzer in 1945: that one day some of the far right’s most extreme ideas would make their way into one of the two mainstem parties and become part of normal political discourse and policy.⁶⁷

Both fears were realized by January 2021. Not only did Proud Boys and Oath Keepers utilize new means of communication to coordinate their actions, but far-right members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz helped the GOP normalize the MAGA movement’s most extreme ideas and conspiracies: restore White Christians to power; prevent race suicide by restricting the immigration of people of color; and limit the ability of Jews and their internationalist allies (like George Soros) to plot against the best interests of the American people. Greene warned that Jewish lasers from outer space were causing California fires and accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of using of the “gazpacho police”—a mistaken reference to the Nazi Gestapo—to further her communist goals. While no Republican went so far as to don a Nazi uniform, during the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial race, candidate Mark Robinson boasted “I’m a Black Nazi” and said he would support Adolf Hitler over Barack Obama as president of the United States. Other Trump-era Republicans regularly promoted what would once have been considered extremist ideas, be it QAnon conspiracy theories or the violent activities of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.⁶⁸

The line between patriots and traitors grew increasingly blurred after Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025. He embraced far-right politicians and militias, and they embraced him. As he had pledged to do if elected, he immediately granted clemency to the convicted “patriots” who had stormed the Capitol in January 2021. The triumphant president promised revenge against politicians like Republican Liz Cheney who had repeatedly denounced his illegal actions. Trump seemed especially pleased to commute the sentences two of his strongest supporters, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes. Tarrio thanked the president “for helping us through these difficult times” and, like the president, promised retribution against those who had in his opinion wrongly convicted him.⁶⁹

The reelection of Donald Trump signaled a triumph for the men and women who had pursued a particular vision of America since the end of World War II. When President Trump ordered an end to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives for any organization receiving federal funding, he was harkening back to 1945 and beyond, when many returning veterans complained the government had betrayed the nation’s white Christians. Emory Burke, Jesse B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell would have been proud of the forty-seventh president of the United States.

What is to be done? What can be done? Democracy requires constant vigilance against all enemies, internal and external. Hate has been a central part of American history since the nation’s founding. Yet so has resistance to hate. From 1945 until today, ordinary men and women from local churches, synagogues, mosques, and national organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have refused to allow their nation and its people to be overtaken by hate groups. The men and women who risked their lives by going undercover during the post–World War II decades were almost all white and Christian, yet they never saw themselves as just protecting Jews or Blacks. They were protecting their fellow Americans and protecting democracy from harm. They could not destroy hate; no one could. But they succeeded in pushing hate to the margins and, in so doing, saved countless citizens from dying or living in constant fear. Without the concerted efforts of these heroic spies and their secret war against hate, there would have been far more murder and mayhem in the last half of the twentieth century. They showed us that when a government fails to stem the rise of extremists bent on violence, it is the duty of every citizen to protect the lives of every American, no matter their race or religion.

Looking to the future, the best long-term solution to combating hate comes from a “Founding Father” admired by far-right activists from Emory Burke to Timothy McVeigh. Writing in the early 1780s, when democracy was still in a fragile state, Thomas Jefferson warned against political hucksters who would manipulate citizens for their own selfish ends. Every government on earth, he observed, contains “some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover. . . [and] cultivate.” Governments degenerate “when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.” The people, he insisted, “are safe depositories of their own liberty, and . . . are not safe unless enlightened.”⁷⁰

Jefferson advocated creating a nationwide public school system that would “crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.” If “every individual which composes their mass participates of the ultimate authority, the government will be safe; because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth.” To that end, Jefferson called for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing universal public education. A thorough education, he reasoned, would enable citizens “to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.” Education was the best safeguard against tyranny.⁷¹

In an ideal republic, educated citizens will study the issues of the day and then vote for what they reason to be best for democracy and for the nation. And those reasoned decisions will be based on fact, not prejudice or paranoid fantasies. What Jefferson saw as necessary to the survival of the republic in the 1780s remains true to this day. Where there is reason, there is hope; where there is ignorance, there is tyranny. It is up to every citizen to decide which path they and their nation will pursue.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Living with the far-right protagonists in this book and their Nazi, fascist, nationalist, and White Supremacist friends has been an intense task. Fortunately, several people have made the experience a lot easier. I want acknowledge the many unsung archivists who make writing such a book possible. My thanks go to David Sigler, a powerhouse of knowledge about the spy documents in the archives of the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles (1921–2004) in the Special Collections department at California State University, Northridge. A very special acknowledgment goes to Vianca Victor and the entire staff in Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The library houses over 700 boxes of material in the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League Collection—from spy reports to everyday bureaucratic life. Grace Bichler at Cornell University’s archives graciously scanned and sent me copies of the William “Butch” Goring Collection. Kathy Lafferty at the University of Kansas’s Spencer Library was equally generous in providing me material from their collection, as was Michelle Victoria Asci at the George State University Archives. The archivists at the Center for Jewish History in New York helped me work through the invaluable material and spy reports in the Abraham Shoenfeld Collection. Likewise, archivists at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, scanned hundreds of pages of American Jewish Committee reports. Closer to home, Claude Zachary and Susan Luftschein in the Special Collection department at the University of Southern California Libraries helped me navigate the massive Los Angeles Examiner clippings files for images to use in this book. Thanks, too, to the staff at the New York Public Library for their always excellent help.

I was fortunate to have several excellent research assistants. Special thanks to Simon Judkins, who first tipped me off to the ANL spy reports held in the archives at Columbia University. Simon took time from his own research on late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century American surveillance to share his files and then help me work through the hundreds of Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League undercover reports. Without his help, this book might never have been written. I am also grateful to the research help I received from graduate students Stanley Fonseca and Jhelene Shaw.

Several friends and colleagues read through and commented on multiple chapters of this book. My thanks go to Ezra Suleiman and to my USC colleagues Alice Baumgartner and Alaina Morgan for offering smart advice on the entire book. Gavriel Rosenfeld, a superb historian of European fascism and president of the Center for Jewish History, gave the manuscript an equally valuable set of critiques. I am also indebted to Robert Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, who took time from his extraordinarily demanding schedule to read and comment on the manuscript. Several graduate students offered valuable advice on early drafts: Jacob Ramirez-Cardenas, Lena Petrova, and Jhelene Shaw. Likewise, students in my fall 2023 Thematic Options seminar offered shrewd comments on several chapters.

I was not able to interview any of the early leaders of the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League. However, I profited from talking to their adult children. Thanks to Barnet Kellman, son of AJC undercover operation overseer George Kellman; Janie Forster Berman, daughter of ADL spymaster Arnold Forster; David Epstein, son of ADL national director Benjamin Epstein; and Ellen James, niece of AJC spymaster Abraham Shoenfeld.

My book has profited from working with two editors at Bloomsbury, Ben Hyman and Anton Mueller, and from copy editor Janet McDonald. Their close reading and suggestions have made this a far better work. I also want to acknowledge the help and constant support I’ve received from Sandy Dijkstra, Elise Capron, and Andrea Cavallero at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. This is my third book working with them and each book has benefited from their collective wisdom.

I am very lucky to have four friends who have read through several of my books and always offered honest advice—even if it meant a lot more work for me. Jon Boorstin has helped me elevate the literary quality of the book and urged me to always look for the drama in any story. Dick Miller, a friend since graduate school days, has read through virtually everything I have ever written and has always pointed me toward sharpening my stories and analysis of their meaning. Likewise, my colleague and pal Phil Ethington has been a constant source of support and an invaluable reader and critic—someone who knows how to mix praise with criticism. I also need to acknowledge my longtime friend, the wonderful historian Robert Slayton, who passed away in December 2023. Despite a rare disease that left him partially paralyzed for many years, Bob never complained, never wavered from his own work, and always pushed me to make my work better. He will be missed.

Finally, my greatest debt goes to my wonderful family. For young parents out there, those college tuition dollars can eventually work to your benefit. My daughter Lydia Ross and son Gabriel Ross have been a source of love, support, and good advice—about this book and life in general. The greatest stroke of luck in my life was meeting my wife, Linda Kent, on a blind date. Forty-two years later, she remains my best friend and the only person who not only reads all my written work but will graciously listen to my endless discussions of ideas and themes. She has made my life richer than I ever could have imagined.

I have dedicated the book to Julian Ross Sless-Kitain, the infant son of my daughter Lydia and her husband Areif Sless-Kitain. He and his generation are our hope for a more democratic future.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

ADL | Anti-Defamation League
AJC | American Jewish Committee
AJC Archives | Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati
AJYB | American Jewish Year Book
ANL | Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League
Goring Papers | William Bill Goring White Supremacist Organizations Collection, 1962–1970, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York
Lazar Collection | Ernie Lazar Freedom of Information Act Collection Extreme Right Groups, https://archive.org/details/lazarfoia
NR Bulletin | National Renaissance Bulletin
NSANL Papers | Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York
NRP | National Renaissance Party
Shoenfeld Papers | Abraham Shoenfeld Papers, Center for Jewish History, New York

INTRODUCTION: THE GOOD WAR, THE GREATEST GENERATION, AND THE BETRAYED GENERATION

1 None of the groups I write about ever refer to themselves as “hate groups.” “Nationalist” has been their preferred term. I use “hate group” to represent a broad array of organizations on the far right that include the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, neo-Nazis, fascists, militias, and myriad White Supremacist movements. Some had policies that extended beyond mere hate; but hate was always at the core of their existence. There are many other well-known leaders on the far right such as William Luther Pierce, Asa Carter, and Willis Carto who deserve further study. However, the four leaders I chose cooperated with one another over the course of several decades—even if they did not like each other. That made them unique in the right-wing world.

2 Arnold Forster, A Measure of Freedom: An Anti-Defamation League Report (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 81. For a discussion of isolationist threats before and during the war, see Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

3 “Confidential Memo: Philip Chasin to Nathan M. Orbach, June 15, 1945,” contained in correspondence, L. B. Nichols to Mr. Tolson, Jan. 28, 1947, https://www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000---100-HQ-530---Section5.PDF. Many FBI documents regarding the ADL can be found on the website The Israel Lobby Archive: The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy at www.israellobby.org. When asked by pollsters, “Do you think Jews have too much power in the United States,” the percentage of Americans responding “Yes” rose from 41 percent in March 1938 to 58 percent in June 1945—this despite the horrific news about the mass extermination of millions of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Poll results quoted in Leonard Dinnerstein, “Anti-Semitism Exposed and Attacked, 1945–1950,” American Jewish History 71 (Sept. 1981), 135; also see Susan Welch, “American Opinion Toward Jews During the Nazi Era: Results from Quota Sample Polling During the 1930s and 1940s,” Social Science Quarterly 95 (March 2014), 624.

4 Poll results cited in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 81.

5 Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 2001).

6 Arnold Forster Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Stanley Wexler and Jane R. Ornauer, vol. 8 (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1998), 127; Alexander Miller Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Nathan C. Belth, Alexander F. Miller, and Lester J. Waldman, vol. 5, part B (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 166. Jewish war veteran figures are taken from John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 316; for Black figures, see “Victory at Home and Abroad: African American Army Nurses in World War II,” National Museum of African American History & Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/nurses-WWII.

7 For wartime congressional legislation and the impact of the FEPC, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83–84.

8 Lanier Waller, “I Saw Race Hatred as a Child,” Part I, page 1, handwritten memo, c. Dec. 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

CHAPTER 1: RETURNING FROM WAR, RETURNING TO WAR

1 Green quoted in Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50; Boston Globe, Oct. 21, 1945.

2 Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 27. Reports of the cross burning can be found in New York Times, Boston Globe, and Atlanta Daily World, Oct. 21, 1945; and in Baltimore Afro-American and Chicago Defender, Oct. 27, 1945.

3 Stetson Kennedy Report, Oct. 19, 1945, NSANL Papers, Box 325 f8; Green quoted in David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 3rd edition), 326.

4 “Orders From Atlanta Ga. To Local Klan to Prepare for Action After May 1,” April 18, 1945, Community Relations Committee, Series 2, Box 75 f1, Special Collections, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge (CSUN); also see Kruse, White Flight, 51. At the time of the cross burning, Stone Mountain featured half-finished carvings of General Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

5 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 44.

6 Kennedy, 19. Kennedy’s book describes his early upbring and encounters with the Ku Klux Klan. There has been a lively debate over how much of Kennedy’s account in The Klan Unmasked is accurate. The archives of the NSANL suggest that the general details of Kennedy’s reports are all accurate. However, several events he describes were reported by other ANL agents. So, while Kennedy may take credit for the actions of others, he was a first-hand witness to everything he describes. For a critical look at Kennedy’s accounts, see Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Hoodwinked?”, New York Times, Jan. 8, 2006. For Kennedy’s background, see Peggy A. Bulger, Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy (Cocoa, FL: Florida Historical Society Press, 2017); https://www.stetsonkennedy.com; Stetson Kennedy Papers, Georgia State University Library, https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/SKennedy.

7 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 20; Stetson Kennedy, Palmetto Country (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1989), 90.

8 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 20.

9 Kennedy quoted in Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2011; Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 21.

10 James Sheldon, “Summary of Investigation of Ku Klux Klan,” NSANL Papers, Box 324 f14.

11 For histories of the Klan, see Chalmers, Hooded Americanism; Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017); ADL Washington Office, News Letter 1, no. 2 (July 8, 1944), https://www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000---100-HQ-530---Section5.PDF; also see NSANL Report, “Summary of the Investigation of the Ku Klux Klan,” nd., NSANL Papers, Box 324 f10.

12 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 27.

13 Carlson, Plotters, 50; Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 14.

14 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 48; Bulger, Stetson Kennedy, 207; Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 9.

CHAPTER 2: SPYING ON THE KU KLUX KLAN

1 Arnold Forster, Square One (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988), 87.

2 John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), viii, vii.

3 Forster and Mintzer quoted in Joint Memorandum: The American Jewish Committee (NYC) and the Anti-Defamation League (Chicago), “Prejudice: Our Postwar Battle,” June 8, 1945, CRC2 130-12: ADL BB-Natl Correspondence June–July 1945, CRC2, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, Community Relations Committee Collection, Special Collections, California State University Northridge, Northridge, CA.; Rogge quoted in George J. Mintzer and Newman Levy, The International Anti-Semitic Conspiracy (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1946), 62.

4 James Sheldon to John A. Middleton, May 2, 1967, 5, James H. Sheldon Papers, 1945–1971, Box 9 f8, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. This is a twelve-page autobiographical statement.

5 George Mintzer quoted in The American Jewish Committee 37th Annual Report (NY 1944), 575; N. N. Orbach to President, July 6, 1945, quoted in R.B. Hood, Special Agent in Charge, to the FBI Director, [month unclear] 13, 1947, https://www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000---100-HQ-530---Section7.PDF; NSANL News Release: Sheldon Address to 14th Anniversary Dinner of NSANL April 4, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f20.

6 Alfred L. Bernheim to Alan M. Stroock, “Memorandum on the AJC Legal Committee’s Undercover Work,” Jan. 1, 1938, https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/939/; Arnold Forster Oral Memoir, “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Stanley Wexler and Jane R. Ornauer, vol. 8 (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1998), 143.

7 Author telephone interview with David Epstein, May 17, 2024.

8 Randolph and Fauset quoted in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 98.

9 Alexander Miller Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Nathan C. Belth, Alexander F. Miller, and Lester J. Waldman, vol. 5, part B (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 6. For plots to kill Jews, many of which included members of American law enforcement, see Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Laura Rosenzweig, Hollywood Spies (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Forster, Square One, 100–1; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 217.

10 For Hoover’s persistent refusal to place Nazi leaders under surveillance and for the pro-fascist leanings of many urban police and sheriff deputies, see Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles, 284. Hermann Schwinn’s Freedom of Information File (FOIA) begins in January 1942, several weeks after Pearl Harbor. When it came to knowing who to arrest in Los Angeles on Dec. 8, 1941, the FBI relied almost entirely on information received from Leon Lewis and his assistant Joe Roos. The two men ran an independent operation that spied on Nazis and fascists in Los Angeles from August 1933 to the end of World War II. For Hoover’s ordering FBI agents to tail Chaplin and Sinclair, see Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11, 27. When Hoover took over as head of the FBI, he fired all Black men and women who were serving as special agents as well as most of the Bureau’s Jewish agents. Lerone A. Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 27.

11 Bilbo quoted in Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 87; for Rankin’s first quote, see Julian E. Zelizer, “Trump Needs to Demilitarize His Rhetoric,” Atlantic, Oct. 29, 2018; his second quote is in [San Mateo, CA.] Home Front News, June 15, 1946, in CRC2, Box 101 f21, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, Community Relations Committee Collection, Special Collections, California State University Northridge, Northridge, CA. For the 1934 HUAC investigations shifting from Nazism and fascism to communism, see Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles.

12 [Los Angeles] Citizen News, June 13, 1946; Stetson Kennedy, typed notes, “Rankin, Jan. 4, 1950,” https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/SKennedy/id/4332/rec/5.

13 Interview with Milton Ellerin, Sept. 1980, AJC Oral History project, 21, Oral History Collection, New York Public Library; also see Milton Ellerin, “American Nazis: Myth or Menace?” Trends Analyses Division, Domestic Affairs Department, American Jewish Committee (New York, 1977). For ANL’s exposure of the Bund–Klan alliance, see Richard Rollins, I Find Treason: The Story of an American Anti-Nazi Agent (New York: William Morrow, 1941), 185–93.

14 Forster, Square One, 56; Forster in “Not the Work of a Day,” vol. 8, 142.

15 Forster, Square One, 87; Smith and Pegler quoted in New York Post, Jan. 31, 1946.

16 Forster in “Not the Work of a Day,” vol. 8, 150.

17 Benjamin Epstein Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Oscar Cohen and Stanley Wexler, vol. 1 (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 58; Marianne R. Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007), 30.

18 Forster in “Not the Work of a Day,” vol 8, 131.

19 Forster, 139–40, 143, 175.

20 Forster, 175.

21 “To: Investigative Department from Prof. James Sheldon, Agent/Spy Pledge Form from JHS: 1945: All persons acting as investigators, NSANL,” NSANL Papers, Box 309 f18.

22 “Civ D/I Pro, n.d. but circa 1950–51: Typed Report on Charge and Goal of the Investigative Division of AJC,” AJC Records, MS-780, Box A13, f1, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati.

23 Author telephone interview with David Epstein, May 17, 2024; FBI Report, M.A. Jones to Mr. Nicholas, Feb. 3, 1950, https://www.israellobby.org/ADL/NARA/100-hq-367944op.pdf; https://www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000---100-HQ-530---Section5.PDF.

24 Special Agent in Charge [SAC] Atlanta to Director, Nov. 24, 1944, https://www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000---100-HQ-530---Section5.PDF.

25 L. B. Nichols to Mr. Tolson, Nov. 4, 1942, https://www.israellobby.org/adl/1199215-000---100-HQ-530---Section4.PDF (scroll down for Nov. 4, 1942 entry); Steven Weisenburger, “The Columbians, Inc.: A Chapter of Racial Hatred from the Post–World War II South,” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 4 (Nov. 2003), 847.

26 Peggy A. Bulger, Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy (Cocoa, FL: Florida Historical Society Press, 2017), 214–15 n83.

27 For an excellent biography of Kennedy, see Bulger, Stetson Kennedy.

28 Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure (New York: Doubleday, 1946), 175; Klapprott quoted in Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 5.

29 For the thwarted Nazi–Klan alliance, see Rollins, I Find Treason, 185–93; David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 3rd edition), 326.

30 Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 81; also see Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 327–28.

31 Biographical information on Dan Duke is drawn from ancestry.com, accessed July 11, 2021; Wolfgang Saxon, “Lawrence D. Duke Sr., 86; Fought the Klan in Georgia,” New York Times, April 1, 1999; Carlson, The Plotters, 50; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 327–28; Interview with Daniel Duke, Aug. 22, 1990, Interview A-0366, Southern Oral History Program Collection (4007), https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/html_use/A-0366.html; “Interview with Daniel Duke, Oct. 3, 1990,” Georgia Government Documentation Project, Special Collections, Georgia State University Library, digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/ggdp/id/5701.

32 Sheldon to Middleton, May 2, 1967, 1, Sheldon Papers, Box 9 f8

33 Ibid.; New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 18, 1939. I could not confirm whether this was true. Brown was married twice and had twenty children and dozens of grandchildren. It is quite possible Sheldon was a direct descendant; he never said one way or another.

34 Sheldon to Middleton, May 2, 1967, 5.

35 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 8; also see Sheldon to Middleton, May 2, 1967, 11. The account of their initial meeting Kennedy describes in his autobiography, Klan Unmasked, is filled with a number of inaccuracies. For Kennedy and Duke, see “Interview with Daniel Duke, Oct. 3, 1990.”

36 Both quotes are from the Stetson Kennedy Report, March 7, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f13.

37 Miller Oral History in “Not the Work of a Day” (1987), vol. 5, part B, 155.

38 Kennedy Report, May 6, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f2; [Sheldon] “Summary of the Investigation of the Ku Klux Klan,” n.d. NSANL Papers, Box 340 f10.

39 Atlanta Daily World, Dec. 9, 1945.

40 Kennedy Report, May 6, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f2; John Brown Report, Aug. 1, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 326 f12.

41 Kennedy Report, March 7, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f13; Kennedy Report, Oct. 19, 1945, Box 325 f8. Kennedy estimated that at least 25 percent of local Atlanta Klan members wore their uniforms to meetings. Kennedy Report, Feb. 2, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f13.

42 Quoted in Magda Teter, Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 243; NCAA figures are taken from James Albert Burran, “Racial Violence in the South During World War II” (PhD dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1977,) 12; for election results, see Weisenburger, Columbians, 835–36.

43 J. Wayne Dudley, “‘Hate’ Organizations of the 1940s: The Columbians, Inc.,” Phylon 42 (3rd Quarter, 1981), 263; St. Louis Dispatch, June 7, 1946.

44 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 67–68. For Klan records of home sales, see Kennedy Report, April 15, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f2.

45 Kennedy Report, April 29, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f2.

46 Statement by Daniel Duke, Aug. 12, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f42.

47 Stetson Kennedy, “Information Relative to Klavalier Klub Whipping Squad of the Ku Klux Klan: based on undercover agents’ reports: Compiled by Stetson Kennedy, Special Consultant (Former GBI Agent),” NSANL Papers, Box 324 f17.

CHAPTER 3: THE MUNICH OF AMERICA

1 Quoted in Robert Pierce Patrick Jr., “‘A Nail in the Coffin of Racism’: The Story of the Columbians,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85 (Summer 2001), 253. For histories of the Columbians, see Ibid., 245–66; Steven Weisenburger, “The Columbians, Inc.: A Chapter of Racial Hatred from the Post–World War II South,” Journal of Southern History 69 (Nov. 2003), 821–60; J. Wayne Dudley, “‘Hate’ Organizations of the 1940s: The Columbians, Inc.,” Phylon 42 (3rd Quarter, 1981), 262–74; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 42–77; Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 12–17; Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 90–97; Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1975), 207–22; and Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). For a far-right history, see Martin Kerr, “The Columbians: Founding Fathers of American White Nationalism: Part I,” Heritage and Destiny 10 (Winter 2003); and Kerr, “The Columbians: Founding Fathers of American White Nationalism: Part II,” Heritage and Destiny 11 (Spring 2003).

2 Newsweek, Nov. 11, 1946.

3 Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 27 and Nov. 21, 1946.

4 Burke quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 829–30. Information on Burke’s background is drawn from Weisenburger, 826–27; Edward Folliard, “Columbians’ Founders Give Reasons for Organization,” Washington Post, Dec. 2, 1946; and sources in Note 1. For Burke’s autobiographical account of his political evolution, see Emory Burke, Wake Up America: The Story of the Columbians (London: Steven Books, 1949).

5 Newton, National States Rights Party, 12.

6 Patrick Jr., “‘A Nail in the Coffin of Racism,’” 247. For Deatherage’s plot and subsequent sedition trial, see Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 230, 242, 330.

7 Burke quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 829; Emory Burke to George Deatherage, Feb. 13, 1943, NSANL Papers, Box 332 f14.

8 John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 22; Moseley quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 17–18, and in Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 250.

9 Burke to Giles, Feb. 6, 1943, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f15. Statistics are taken from Edward Folliard, “Columbians’ Founders Give Reasons for Organization,” Washington Post, Dec. 2, 1946.

10 Shea quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 833–34; also see Newton, National States Rights Party, 12. For a contemporaneous description of the Columbians and their leaders, see McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 206–22; sources in Note 1.

11 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 125; New York Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Edward Scheidt to Hoover, Nov. 26, 1946, Section 2, FBI file quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 837.

12 McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 208.

13 Loomis quoted in McWilliams, 209; Scheidt to Hoover, Nov. 26, 1946, Section 2, FBI File, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 837. For Loomis’s background, also see Patrick Jr., “‘A Nail in the Coffin of Racism,’” 248–50.

14 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 125, 132–33.

15 First two quotes in McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 209; third quote in Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 125.

16 Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 26, 1947; Foltz to Hoover, May 15, 1947, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 838.

17 Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 830–31. For a perceptive overview of the FEPC, the South, and Southern power in Washington, D.C., during and immediately after World War II, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). For Black–Jewish alliances during the war and postwar, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

18 For an overview of the “Double V” campaign, see Rawn James Jr., The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

19 Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 839.

20 Alabama Journal (Montgomery), May 18, 1949. For excellent overviews of postwar Atlanta and white resentment over government policies aimed at integration, see Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 832–33; and Kruse, White Flight, 19–77.

21 Statement of Ralph Childers, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Box 779 f34; for Burke on working-class men and their families, see Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 830–31.

22 Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 839.

23 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 122.

24 For Bishop, see Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 841; Newton, National States Rights Party, 12–24.

25 PM, December 13, 1946, Deutsch quoted in McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 220.

26 Second Statement of Ralph Childers Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f34. For Southern wages before World War II, see Katznelson, Fear Itself, 171, 183–84.

27 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 120–21.

28 Kennedy, 121.

29 Kennedy, 122, 123.

30 Kennedy, 124.

31 “To Whom It May Concern,” Homer Loomis Jr., Letter of Authorization for Raymond C. Vick, ca. Nov. 1946, NSANL Box 333 f18; Thunderbolt, ca. Sept. 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f8; Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 127.

32 Thunderbolt, ca. Sept. 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f8.

33 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 183.

34 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 127.

35 Kennedy, 130.

36 Kennedy, 130.

37 Kennedy, 130–31.

38 “Preserve ‘White South,’ Columbian Leader Shouts,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 27, 1946, 9 (all quotations except “Jew-Communists” and “before race-war breaks out”); Foltz to Hoover, Oct. 22, 1946, Section 1, FBI File, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 842.

39 Loomis quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 842.

40 Edward Folliard quoting Ralph McGill in “Columbians, Like Hitler, Play Up to ‘Little People,’” Washington Post, Dec. 3, 1946.

41 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 130, 131, 128.

42 Kennedy, 137–39; Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 846 n66.

43 NSANL News Release, nd.1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f2. For Vick’s Columbian connections, see Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 846 n66; NSANL News Release, Feb. 11, 1947, NSANL Box 779 f28; and Indianapolis Star, Dec. 17, 1946.

44 NSANL Press Release, Atlanta, Feb. 10, [1947], NSANL Papers, Box 332 f14.

45 Quoted in McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 219. For a new analysis of Kristallnacht, see Wolf Gruner and Steven J. Ross, eds., “New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Perspective,” in The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review 17 (Purdue University e-Pub, Dec. 2019), https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=purduepress_previews.

46 Membership statistics cited in Weisenburger, “The Columbians,” 822, 826; FBI report, Oct. 18, 1946, FBI Office Memo, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ColumbianWorkersMovementAtlanta10574/page/n223/mode/2upp.

47 Quoted in McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 214.

CHAPTER 4: LET THE VIOLENCE BEGIN

1 Second Statement of Ralph Childers, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f34; Atlanta Daily World, Feb. 20, 1947.

2 Both quotes are from Second Statement of Ralph Childers, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f 34.

3 Second Statement of Ralph Childers.

4 Edward Folliard, “Columbians, Like Hitler, Play Up to ‘Little People,’” Washington Post, Dec. 3, 1946.

5 Ralph Childers, “Background of Ralph Childers,” ca. Dec. 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13; for Jett’s background, see NSANL News Release, June 18, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f19.

6 Childers, “Background of Ralph Childers”; and NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13.

7 Burke quoted in Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 46.

8 For a discussion of Atlanta’s postwar housing crisis, see Betsy Riley, “A Separate Peace: Collier Heights: An Iconic African American Neighborhood, Home to Kings and Hollowells and Abernathys, Makes History Again,” Atlanta, April 30, 2010; and Kruse, White Flight, 42–50.

9 Second Statement of Ralph Childers, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Box 779 f34; Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 151. For a description of postwar Atlanta and its population, see Kruse, White Flight; Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

10 “Columbian Street Survey,” n.d., NSANL Papers, Box 333 f15; Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 842–43.

11 Riley, “A Separate Peace”; Foltz to Hoover, Oct. 28, 1946, Section 1, FBI File; Deposition of Ralph Childers, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 17, NSANL Papers; Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 844.

12 For a more complete description of the Hines story, see Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 152; Robert Pierce Patrick Jr., “‘A Nail in the Coffin of Racism’: The Story of the Columbians,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85 (Summer 2001), 254; Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 6, 1946; Atlanta Daily World, Oct. 30, 1946; Edward A. Hatfield, “Columbians,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/Columbians, accessed May 12, 2020. For Childers’s version of events, see Ralph Childers’s Statement, Dec. 7, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13.

13 New York Post, Nov. 22, 1946, quoted in Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1975), 216; Statement of Childers, Dec. 3, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f5.

14 McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 216.

15 Statement of [Lanier] Waller, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13.

16 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 148–49.

17 The first two quotes are from Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 150; the last is from Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 848.

18 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 151.

19 For the assault on Frank Jones and his family, see Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 148–52; Patrick Jr., “‘A Nail in the Coffin of Racism,’” 255–56; Hatfield, “Columbians.” For membership increase, see Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 845.

20 Background and Statement of Lanier Waller, ca. Dec. 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13.

21 For Waller’s background, see Fred H. Lightsey [Veterans’ Administration] to Lanier Waller, April 9, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f4; Background and Statement of Lanier Waller, ca. Dec. 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13; Lanier Waller, “I Was an American Fascist,” ca. Dec. 1946–Jan. 1947, as told to Saul Levitt, NSANL Papers, Box 337 f4; Lanier Waller, “I Saw Race Hatred as a Child,” Part I, page 1, handwritten memo, c. Dec. 1949, Box 347 f4, NSANL Papers; Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 15. Waller’s military background can be found in ancestry.com, accessed June 15, 2021.

22 Background and Statement of Lanier Waller, ca. Dec. 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 328 f13.

23 Lanier Waller, “I Saw Race Hatred as a Child,” Part I, 347 f4.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Waller, “I Was an American Fascist,” ca. Dec. 1946–Jan. 1947.

28 Ibid.

29 Second Statement of Ralph Childers, Dec. 4, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f34.

30 Waller, “I Was an American Fascist,” ca. Dec. 1946–Jan. 1947, Box 337 f4.

31 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 4, 1946; also see Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 2, 1947.

32 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 6, 1946; Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 8, 1946.

33 Kruse, White Flight, 48.

34 Kuniansky quoted in Greene, The Temple Bombing, 143, 144.

35 Quoted in Kruse, White Flight, 48–49; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 4, 1946. For an excellent description of the Columbian–Jewish War Veteran confrontation, see Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 152–54.

36 Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked, 153; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 4, 1946; McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 214.

37 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 153; Kuniansky quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 144; Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 1, 1946; also see New York Times, Nov. 2, 1946; Washington Post, Dec. 4, 1946; David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 3rd edition), 214; Atlanta ADL head Alexander Miller’s account of the confrontation with Jewish War veterans in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Nathan C. Belth, Alexander F. Miller, and Lester J. Waldman, vol. 5, part B (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 164.

38 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 154.

39 Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 5 and Nov. 9, 1946; Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 846.

40 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 155–56.

41 Burke published five books: Chain-Ganged by the Jewish Gestapo (St. Louis, MO: Christian Nationalist Crusade, 1947); Wake Up America: The Story of the Columbians (London: Steven Books, 1949); The Will of the West (n.p.: Folkrights and Freedom Fellowship, 1987); Wake Up America: Three Essays (Metairie, LA: Sons of Liberty, ca. 1988); The Unlifted Curse (Eclectic, AL.: American Nationalist Publications, 1992).

42 New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 1947.

CHAPTER 5: BRINGING DOWN THE COLUMBIANS

1 Quoted in John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1946), 50.

2 Memorandum: Buzzi Biographical Statement to Sheldon, June 28, 1944, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f18.

3 Ibid.

4 NSANL Statement by Daniel Duke, Aug. 12, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f41.

5 Memorandum: Buzzi Biographical Statement, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f18.

6 Lanier Waller, “I Saw Race Hatred as a Child,” Part I, Sept. 25, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

7 Buzzi Report on Meeting with Moseley, Nov. 24, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f3; Confidential Report, Mario Buzzi to James Sheldon, Nov. 24, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f9.

8 Buzzi Report, Nov. 24, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f9.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Confidential Report, Renee Fruchtbaum to James Sheldon, Nov. 25, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f9; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 1947; Buzzi Report, Nov. 24, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f9; Statements of Childers, Waller, Nov. 24–Dec. 7, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 332 f3.

12 New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 1947.

13 Fruchtbaum Report, Nov. 25, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f9; Steven Weisenburger, “The Columbians, Inc.: A Chapter of Racial Hatred from the Post–World War II South,” Journal of Southern History 69 (Nov. 2003), 849.

14 Fruchtbaum’s background is drawn from ancestry.com, accessed June 15, 2021; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 1947.

15 Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 18, 1946.

16 Atlanta Journal, Feb. 10, 1947.

17 Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 18, 1946.

18 New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 1947.

19 Ibid.

20 Lanier Waller as told to Saul Levitt, “I Was an American Fascist,” ca. January 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 337 f4; “Address by Miss Renee Forrest,” Jan. 26, 1947, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 850n74.

21 Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 5, 1946.

22 Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 6, 1946.

23 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 10, 1946; Atlanta Journal, Nov. 5, 1946.

24 Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 21, 1946.

25 Chicago Defender, Nov. 30, 1946; Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 24, 1946; Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 159; Pomeroy quoted in Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 49. Black newspapers throughout the country covered the Columbian trial. For their report on the Duke–Burke fight, see Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 24, 1946.

26 Mario Buzzi and Rene Fruchtbaum to James Sheldon, “Report: The Columbians,” Nov. 23, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 329 f9.

27 Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 11, 1946; also see Los Angeles Examiner, Dec. 14, 1946.

28 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 158.

29 Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 11, 10, 1946.

30 Statement of Professor Sheldon, Dec. 12, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 331 f4.

31 Statement of Professor Sheldon, Dec. 12, 1946. For charges and dismissal, see Atlanta Journal, Jan. 6, 1947; Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 7, 1947; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 1947.

32 On the wired funds see Foltz to Hoover, Dec. 20, 1946, Section 3, FBI File, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 850n75.

33 Westbrook Pegler, “Anti-Nazis vs. Columbians,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 17, 1946; “Investigated the Columbians,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 3, 1947. A column published on Dec. 18, 1946, gave readers Pegler’s “Lowdown on Mario Buzzi and the League.”

34 Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 19, 1946; Sheldon Report, ca. 1948, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f14.

35 Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 850; Hoover quoted in Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 91; Edwin Foltz to J. Edgar Hoover, Dec. 20, 1946, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 825–26, n8; 850–51.

36 Edwin Foltz to J. Edgar Hoover, Dec. 20, 1946, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 825–26, n8; 850–51; FBI statement regarding Sheldon is quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 850. Hoover’s question (first quotation) was written on a clipped Washington Post story dated Dec. 11, 1946, that Ladd had attached to the back of his report. In Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 851 n76.

37 Violence was released on April 12, 1947, by Monogram Pictures. For a fuller description of the film, see https://catalog.afi.com/Film/25416-VIOLENCE; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_(1947_film). Major newspapers covering the trial included the Boston Globe, Austin American-Statesman, Christian Science Monitor, Cleveland Call and Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post. For coverage by Black newspapers, see Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, Los Angeles Sentinel, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American; for Jewish coverage, see American Israelite, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and Jewish Advocate (Boston). The Feb. 1, 1947, edition of the Baltimore Afro-American featured a picture of Stetson Kennedy covered in a Klan outfit holding a copy of Southern Exposure.

38 Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 12, 1947.

39 Atlanta Daily World, Feb. 13, 1947.

40 Quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 853; Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 15, 1947. For Loomis Sr.’s closing arguments, also see Atlanta Daily World, Feb. 15, 1947; Los Angeles Examiner, Feb. 16, 1947; and Robert Pierce Patrick Jr., “‘A Nail in the Coffin of Racism’: The Story of the Columbians,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85 (Summer 2001), 262.

41 New York Times, Feb. 15, 1947.

42 McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 220; New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 16, 1947.

43 McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 220.

44 Atlanta Journal, Feb. 21, 1947.

45 For Burke’s trial, see coverage in Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Daily World, and Atlanta Journal, Feb. 18–March 2, 1947.

46 Baltimore Afro-American, March 1, 1947; E. E. Andrews to J. H. Sheldon, March 2, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f26.

47 Indianapolis Star, Jan. 23, 1947; for Minneapolis fascists, see NSANL News Release, June 18, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f2.

48 Atlanta Constitution, March 2, 1947; Atlanta Daily World, July 2, 1947.

49 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 93, 94; for Green’s complaint, see Report on Klan Meeting, March 24, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f7. For the radio show, see “Klan Sleuth Gives ‘Superman’ Secrets of Hooded Order,” Bulletin of the ADL 4, no. 2 (Feb. 1947); Richard Bowers, Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2012); David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 3rd edition), 329–30. For comments and reviews of Southern Exposure, see New York Times, Oct. 24, 1946; Atlanta Daily World, Dec. 28, 1946, and April 15, 1947; Washington Post, Dec. 4, 1946; Chicago Defender, Nov. 2, 1946, and Dec. 4, 1946. Recordings of Superman defeating the KKK, “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” can be found at https://archive.org/details/Superman_page09/460610_1308_Clan_Of_The_Fiery_Cross_Pt_01.mp3; https://www.supermanhomepage.com/radio/radio.php?topic=radio-reviews/070146-fierycross.

50 Kennedy, Klan Unmasked, 178.

51 Kennedy, 174, 179. For a fuller account, see Kennedy, 174–182; Atlanta Constitution, April 20, 1947.

52 New York Post, July 25, 1948.

53 NSANL News Release, April 1, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f20. For the meeting in Washington, D.C., see Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 4, 1947.

54 Atlanta Daily World, March 28, 1947; AJC [Civ D/I Pro] n.d. but circa 1950–51: Typed Report on Charge and Goal of the Investigative Division of AJC, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f1.

55 NSANL News, ca. Nov. 1948, NSANL Papers, Box 325 f2. For subsequent reports by Brown and Henderson, see Kennedy Reports to NSANL for 1948–51 in Boxes 305, 324, 327, 337; also see Kennedy Reports in Stetson Kennedy Papers, Georgia State University Library; New York Sun, Feb. 3, 1948; New York Post, Feb. 22, 1948.

56 Arnold Forster, Anti-Semitism in the United States in 1947 (New York and Chicago: Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, 1948), 41.

57 For Kennedy’s KKK charter, see Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 15, 1947. For actions by state and federal authorities, see Atlanta Daily World, June 14, 1947; NSANL News Release: “KKK Still a Menace, Despite Charter Revocation,” June 18, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f19.

58 For Loomis and Burke going to jail, see Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 853; Atlanta Constitution, June 6, 1950, and Feb. 24, 1951; Emory Burke, Chain-Ganged by the Jewish Gestapo (Sons of Liberty: reprint edition, January 1, 1975), 38; “Echoes of The Thunderbolt,” ADL Bulletin 15 (October 1958), 3; The Facts, 13 (October–November 1958), 128; Atlanta Special Agent in Charge (SAC) to Hoover, November 12, 1958, Section 7, FBI File, quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 858 n89. Loomis and Penland married in early 1949. On Burke’s inability to find work and residing with his parents, see Foltz to Hoover, June 15, 1947, Section 5, FBI File. On Burke’s move to Alabama and his legal difficulties and complaints, see St. Louis SAC to Hoover, March 31, 1948, Section 6, FBI File: “Burke has been extremely worried about the criminal charges pending against him and has complained about the manner in which Loomis Sr. has handled” the appeals process. On the delisting of the Columbians, see Guy Hottel to Hoover, April 6, 1950, Section 6, FBI File. Quoted in Weisenburger, “Columbians,” 857 n87.

59 Deutsch quoted in McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege, 222.

CHAPTER 6: DEATH AND DEPORTATION

1 Isaiah M. Minkoff, “Inter-Group Relations,” American Jewish Committee, 39th Annual Report (New York, 1946), 190.

2 Stetson Kennedy interview with J. B. Stoner, Klan Kleagle for TN, July 1, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5.

3 Arthur Gerringer, Terrorism: From One Millennium to the Next (iUniverse, 2002), 222.

4 Biographical information is drawn from John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 53–54; Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017); Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Stetson Kennedy interview with J. B. Stoner, Sept. 7, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5; see NSANL Papers, Box 325 f6 for several more of Kennedy’s interviews with Stoner.

5 Janice D. Wilson interview with Stoner, May 12, 1981, quoted in Webb, Rabble Rousers, 155.

6 Wilson interview with Stoner, quoted in Webb, Rabble Rousers, 155–56.

7 Arnold Forster, Square One (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988), 59; Bilbo quoted in Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 86.

8 Director, FBI to Asst Attorney General T. Vincent Quinn, Criminal Division, Oct. 27, 1947: Subject: Jesse B. Stoner, Chattanooga, “Alleged Mailing of Libelous and Defamatory Matter”; Section 334 and 335, Title 18, USC, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.HQ15797161191pp/page/n3/mode/2up.

9 Ibid.

10 Christian Identity theology was being preached in Los Angeles to large congregations during the early 1940s by hate-ridden ministers such as Joe Jeffers; ADL spy Sylvia Comfort reported on his activities to Leon Lewis. Comfort report, April 27, 1942, CRC2 Box 35 f8, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, Community Relations Committee Collection, Special Collections, California State University Northridge, Northridge, CA. For overviews of Christian Identity theology, see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Arie Perliger, American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Charles H. Roberts, Race Over Grace: The Racialist Religion of the Christian Identity Movement (New York: iUniverse, 2003); Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Barry J. Balleck, Modern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism: An Encyclopedia of Extremists and Extremist Groups (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2018); Anti-Defamation League, Danger: Extremism: The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far-Right Fringe (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1996); David Ostendorf, “Christian Identity: An American Heresy,” Journal of Hate Studies 1 (2001/2002), 23–56; Alon Milwicki, “Baptizing Nazism: An Analysis of the Religious Roots of American Neo-Nazism,” Journal of Hate Studies 12 (2014); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

11 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 234; Perliger, American Zealots, 63; Chicago Defender, Dec. 8, 1945.

12 Stetson Kennedy interview with Sara Stoner, included in interview with J. B. Stoner, Sept. 7, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5; Newton, National States Rights Party, 15.

13 Stetson Kennedy interview with Stoner, July 1, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5. For Stoner’s early wartime meetings, see Director, FBI to Asst Attorney General T. Vincent Quinn, Criminal Division, Oct. 27, 1947: Subject: Jesse B. Stoner, Chattanooga, “Alleged Mailing of Libelous and Defamatory Matter”; Section 334 and 335, Title 18, USC, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.HQ15797161191pp/page/n3/mode/2up.

14 Forster, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 44; Atlanta Daily World, Dec. 9, 1945. For the targeting of Black and Jewish neighborhoods, see Kennedy interview with Stoner, Dec. 12, 1945, NSANL Papers, Box 325 f9; Carlson, Plotters, 53.

15 Washington Post, May 8, 1946.

16 Kennedy interview with Stoner, Chattanooga, Dec. 12, 1945, NSANL Papers, Box 325 f19. Stoner was eighteen when he chartered the first Klan organization in Chattanooga.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 70; Kennedy interview with Stoner, June 15, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5.

21 Kennedy interview with Stoner, June 15, 1946.

22 The first two quotes are from Kennedy interview with Stoner, June 15, 1946. For his rubber stamp, St. Louis-Dispatch, June 7, 1946.

23 The Gospel of Jesus Christ versus the Jews: Christianity’s Attitude toward the Jews as Explained by the Holy Bible (Chattanooga: Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, 1946), 12; also see Kennedy interview with Stoner, June 15, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5; Christ Not a Jew and Jews Not God’s Chosen People (Marietta, GA: Thunderbolt, 1974); Crusade Against Corruption (Marietta, GA: 2000). Stoner’s most unusual publication came around 1957: Elijah Muhammad and Jesse Benjamin Stoner, White Christian Party Attacks Equality, Purity, Beauty and Religion of the Negroes: Mr. Elijah Muhammad Defends Islam and the So-called Negroes (Chicago: Muhammad’s Temple of Islam No. 2, ca. 1957); J. B. Stoner et al., Voices on Anti-Semitism: Christian & Jewish Perspectives (n.p.: Riverwalk Press, January 1, 1996).

24 Kennedy interview with Stoner, July 1, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5; Atlanta Constitution, July 5, 1946. A copy of Kennedy’s syndicated column appeared in the Washington Post, May 8, 1946. The ADL and ANL often fed Pearson information they received from Stetson Kennedy.

25 Atlanta Constitution, July 5, 1946. For several examples, see columns in Pittsburgh Courier, June 1, 1946; Louisville Courier-Journal, May 8, 1946; Detroit Free Press, June 3, 1946; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 7, 1946; Chicago Defender, Oct. 26, 1946; New York Amsterdam News, March 1, 1947, and April 10, 1948; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 27, 1947; Jewish Advocate (Boston), May 29, 1947.

26 Chicago Defender, Oct. 26, 1946; Anti-Defamation League Bulletin and Washington News Letter 3, no. 7 (Sept. 1946).

27 FBI Report, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.HQ15797161191pp/page/n5/mode/2up. For earnings in the South and the North, see Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1946), 4.

28 Kennedy interview with Stoner, July 1, 1946, and Sept. 28, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5; The Worker, Magazine Section, July 21, 1946.

29 Kennedy interview with Stoner, Sept. 28, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5.

30 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Aug. 7, 1945; Kennedy interview with Stoner, Sept. 28, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 327 f5; for ADL and AJC and Reynolds, see Nathan Schachner, The Price of Liberty: A History of the American Jewish Committee (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1948), 162–63; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906-1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 375.

31 Newton, National States Rights Party, 15.

32 J. B. Stoner to Emory Burke, Nov. 20, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 333 f7; Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 143.

33 NSANL News, Feb. 11, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f28.

34 For Smith’s background, see Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith Minister of Hate (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right; Gerald L. K. Smith and Elna M. Robertson, Besieged Patriot: Autobiographical Episodes Exposing Communism, Traitorism, and Zionism from the Life of Gerald L. K. Smith (Elna M. Smith Foundation, Jan 1, 1978).

35 Quoted in Jeansonne, Smith, 106, 103, 122–23; NSANL News Release, April 28, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f23; Forster, A Measure of Freedom, 36.

36 NSANL News Release: “Gerald L. K. Smith’s ‘Triumphant’ Southern Campaign Collapses after Expose of Tie-Up with Columbians,” April 28, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f23. For AJC undercover operations, see “Reporter GEC,” Dec. 16, 1948, Abraham Shoenfeld Papers, Box 9 f2; “DET-‘SLO’—Office,” July 1949, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 9 f3; Forster, “Not In the Work of a Day,” 8, 140; Forster, Anti-Semitism, 44, 79–80.

37 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 27, 1947.

38 Eugene Cook to Stetson Kennedy, March 23, 1948, https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/SKennedy/id/2552/rec/3; Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 22, 1948; Cook to Kennedy, March 23, 1948, https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/SKennedy/id/7456/rec/2.

39 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 158–59; Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 96.

40 Activities of Ku Klux Klan in the U.S., J. B. Stoner: Testimony Before Congress, p. 3804, Post 1965, https://civilrights.flagler.edu/digital/collection/p16000coll4/id/1216; Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 1, 1977.

41 For Loomis joining Stoner and Fields in law school, see Atlanta Daily World, Feb. 24, 1951.

42 Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 29, 1952. The AJC’s Abraham Shoenfeld had his agents tail Burke during his years with Smith. “Reporter GEC,” Dec. 16, 1948, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 9, f2. For Smith’s continued relationship with Moseley, see Oct. 8, 13, 1948, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/detail/ColumbianWorkersMovementAtlanta10574/page/n247/mode/2up.

43 FBI Memo: Special Agent in Charge Atlanta, Christian Anti-Jewish Party, March 6, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ChristianAntiJewishPartyJBStonerSanFrancisco1004443811852pp/page/n5/mode/2up; FBI Memo: Special Agent in Charge Atlanta, Oct. 10 and 15, 1952, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ColumbianWorkersMovementAtlanta10574/page/n193/mode/2up.

44 Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 21, 1952; for Stoner’s outreach efforts, see Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ChristianAntiJewishPartyJBStonerSanFrancisco1004443811852pp/page/n19/mode/2up.

45 “Free America From the Jews” postcard, FBI Memo: Special Agent in Charge Atlanta, Christian Anti-Jewish Party, March 6, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ChristianAntiJewishPartyJBStonerSanFrancisco1004443811852pp/page/n5/mode/2up. Most of the postcards and flyers cited here were sent sometime in June 1953.

46 Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 29, 30, 1952; Baltimore Afro-American, Dec. 15, 1951.

47 Many FBI informants belonged to the KKK and provided the FBI with a great deal of inaccurate information. The Ernie Lazar Collection contains material from Stoner’s FOIA file; see Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Christian+Anti-Jewish+Party%22.

48 Information about the flyers can be found at Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ChristianAntiJewishPartyJBStonerSanFrancisco1004443811852pp/page/n15/mode/2up; Bible quotes in “An Application for Membership”; “Save the White Race” postcard; “Free America from the Jews” postcard, all three in NSANL Papers, Box 270 f3.

49 Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), Aug. 27, 1954.

50 Both quotes from “Save the White Race” postcard, NSANL Papers, Box 270 f3.

51 “Free America from the Jews” postcard, NSANL Papers, Box 270 f3.

52 “An Application for Membership,” NSANL Papers, Box 270 f3.

53 FBI SAC Atlanta to Director, March 31, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ChristianAntiJewishPartyJ.B.StonerAtlanta1004976/page/n155/mode/2up.

54 Jewish Advocate (Boston), Dec. 30, 1954. Madole’s speech was made in 1953. For Madole’s travel plans, see “Handwritten Memo: L. W. [Lanier Waller],” Dec. 26, 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

CHAPTER 7: “KILL THE JEWS, SAVE THE WHITE RACE”

1 Quote is from NRP sticker, ca. Dec. 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 341 f20.

2 “How Can I Become a Menace,” ADL Bulletin, November 1953, quoted in New York Daily News, March 23, 1955.

3 Lanier Waller to Prof. Sheldon, Jan. 13, 1950, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4; Atlanta Constitution, May 27, 1949.

4 Emmanuel Trujillo Report, Aug. 22, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f1; “Reporter GEC,” March 24, 1950, Abraham Shoenfeld Papers, Box 10 f2.

5 Both quotes from Trujillo Report, Aug. 23, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f1.

6 Emmanuel Trujillo Report, Aug. 22, 1953; Trujillo Report, Aug. 23 written on Aug. 24, 1953, Box 343 f1.

7 Quote is from NRP sticker, ca. Dec. 1953, Box 341 f20.

8 Sheldon Address, April 4, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f20; George J. Mintzer and Newman Levy, The International Anti-Semitic Conspiracy (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1946), 3. For the revival of Nazism and fascism in postwar Europe, see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

9 National Renaissance Bulletin, September 1969, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f1; FBI SAC NY, Aug. 26, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n5/mode/2up; for the NR Bulletin’s international reach, see Stephen E. Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 89.

10 Bulletin of the ADL 4 (April 1947), 2; for increasingly violent attacks against Jews, see Arnold Forster, Anti-Semitism in the United States in 1947 (New York and Chicago: Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, 1948), 27.

11 For the AJC’s cautious approach to investigations, see Benjamin Epstein Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Oscar Cohen and Stanley Wexler, vol. 1 (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 58.

12 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 16, 1947.

13 Mintzer and Levy, International Anti-Semitic Conspiracy, 3; AJC “Investigative and Fact-Finding Division,” Oct. 30, 1951, American Jewish Committee Records, 1917–1987, MS-780 Box A-13 f2, AJC Archives. For Shoenfeld’s background, and his reputation as the city’s original “tough Jew,” Dan Slater, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld (New York and Boston: Little Brown, 2024); “Honest Abe,” Six for Five: An Illustrated History of New York’s Jewish Criminal Community, 1900–1945, http://sixforfive.blogspot.com/2008/08/honest-abe.html; email correspondence and telephone interview with Ellen James (Shoenfeld’s niece), June 22, 2020; also see Biographical Note in Guide to Abraham Shoenfeld Papers, https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/3/resources/32.

14 AJC, D&D: Investigative and Fact-Finding Division: Oct. 30, 1951, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f2. For a brief description of Shoenfeld’s agents, see Guide to the Abraham Shoenfeld (1891–1977) Papers, 1892, 1920–1978, 2010 (bulk 1927–1964) P-884, Shoenfeld Papers.

15 For his first report concerning Weiss and Madole, see Shoenfeld Report, Jan. 5, 1949, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 9 f2.

16 Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Cross-Currents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 204, 203.

17 For Weiss’s background, see Truhill Report, Dec. 7, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f3; Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 202–207; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 77–78; Margot Metroland, “Remembering Frederick Charles Ferdinand Weiss (July 31, 1885–March 1, 1968): The Talented & Elusive Mister Weiss,” July 31, 2023, Counter-Currents, https://counter-currents.com/2023/07/remembering-frederick-charles-ferdinand-weiss/.

18 Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 211; also see, “Reporter GEC,” Jan. 27, Feb. 24, and March 5, 1949, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 9 f2. For Weiss’s foreign ties and domestic correspondents, see Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 203–15; Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 77–78; George Van Horn Moseley to Charles Weiss, Dec. 1, 1947, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 8 f1; Emory Burke to Charles Weiss, Oct. 24, 1947, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 8 f7.

19 Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 203. For the founding of the NRP, see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 81, 418–20; Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 136–37; Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017; Anna Duensing, “‘An American Organization, A Hundred Per Cent’: The Competing Legacies of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, The National Renaissance Party,” March 17, 2020, see link to article on Duensing’s website, https://www.annaduensing.com.

20 Biographical information on Madole is taken from sources mentioned in previous note; ancestry.com; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Madole.

21 The first quote is from The Compass (New York), Nov. 20, 1949, and is quoted in FBI Report, New York Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Aug. 26, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n11/mode/2up; Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 418.

22 The first two quotes are from FBI Report, Aug. 26, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n9/mode/2up; FBI NY Special Agent Report, Nov. 15, 1948, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.tx. “Animist Party Membership and Minute Book, n.d.–May 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 156 f28. For more on the Animist Party, see Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 73–75.

23 For an analysis of American anxiety at the beginning of the Cold War and atomic age, see Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

24 The NRP nine-point platform was issued in August 1949 and appeared on the left side of NRP stationery; it was republished in the NR Bulletin in Oct. 1953. For a copy, see Dec. 10, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f23.

25 “Reporter GEC,” April 18, 1949, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 9 f2; NR Bulletin, Jan. 1949, in Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-1/page/n3/mode/2up.

26 The first quote is from the NR Bulletin, Jan. 1949, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-1/page/n3/mode/2up; and the second is from its February issue, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-1/page/n7/mode/2up.

27 Madole to MacFarland, Jan. 16, 1949, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-1/mode/2up.

28 FBI Report NY SAC, Aug. 26, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n29/mode/2up.

29 For a copy of the NRP nine-point platform, see Dec. 10, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f23.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.; also see FBI Report NY SAC, Aug. 26, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n29/mode/2up.

32 Truman received 24.2 million votes, Dewey 22 million, and Thurmond 1.2 million; his 39 electoral votes came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace got 1.2 million votes and Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas got 139,572. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 161; for the fracturing of the Democratic Party, see Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).

33 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 203. For the rise of ultraconservatism from the 1940s through the 1960s, see John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

34 By 1963, his asthma grew so severe that an FBI agent reported he “has been unable to hold a steady job.” FBI Report Vincent J. Ascherl Re: James Madole, Nov. 29, 1963, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-2/page/n189/mode/2up.

35 NR Bulletin, Sept. 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f1; for Jews and Gun Hill postwar housing, see Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 54–55.

36 FBI Report Vincent J. Ascherl Re: James Madole, Nov. 29, 1963, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-2/page/n201/mode/2up.

37 “Minutes of Investigative and Fact-Finding Committee Meeting,” April 13, 1950, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A13 f3.

38 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 74.

39 NR Bulletin, Sept. 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f1.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 “Investigative and Fact-Finding Division of the Civil Rights Department, Jan. 8, 1952, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f1; and “Minutes of the Meeting of the Investigative and Fact-Finding Committee, Starts May 7, 1952,” AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f3.

43 For examples of Waller’s continued service on behalf of the NSANL, see “Statement of Waller, Feb. 18, 1947,” NSANL Papers, Box 330 f13; NSANL News Release, Oct. 11, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f8; Waller to Sheldon, May 3 and July 20, 1948, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f14; Waller to Sheldon, Feb. 25, 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f10. For Waller’s initial encounter with Madole, see James Sheldon Memorandum, July 29, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f12.

44 Lanier Waller, “I Saw Race Hatred as a Child,” NSANL Papers, Part I, page 1, handwritten memo, c. Dec. 1949, Box 347 f4.

45 NSANL Stationery: News Release: Oct 11, 1947: “Klan, Smith, Columbian Leaders Merge Forces in Nation-Wide Hate Propaganda Drive,” Oct. 11, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f8; Waller handwritten note, Sept. 25, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 337 f4; Lanier Waller to James Sheldon, Feb. 25, 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f10; Handwritten memo: L. W. [Lanier Waller], Dec. 26, 1949, Box 347 f4.

46 Waller to Sheldon, Feb. 25, 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 324 f10.

47 Lanier Waller, handwritten memo, Dec. 26, 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

48 Lanier Waller to Prof. Sheldon, Jan. 13, 1950, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid. For Gibbons, see Jewish Post (Indianapolis), Jan. 24, 1947.

51 Lanier Waller to Prof. Sheldon, Jan. 13, 1950, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

52 Ibid.

53 “Reporter GEC,” March 24, April 2, 1950, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 10 f2; for examples of Waller’s travels, see “Telegram: Waller to Sheldon,” April 24, 1950, NSANL Papers, Box 337 f2.

54 Abe Shoenfeld Report, April 17–18, 1950, and Report “Column-AS,” April 18, 1950, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 10 f2.

55 AJC Investigative and Fact-Finding Division Report, Oct. 30, 1951, AJC Archives, MS-780 Box A-13 f2. For a closer look at McCarthyism and the spread of anticommunism during this period, see Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2004). For an excellent look at the Cold War and its impact on American life, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2006).

56 FBI Reports, May 8, June 18, and Aug. 12, 1952, Lazar Collection, https://stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt. For NR Bulletin circulation figures, see FBI Report NY SAC, Aug. 26, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n31/mode/2up; for ADL and AJC excluding ANL, see “Proposal for Joint Operation of AJC and ADL Fact-Finding,” Feb. 26, 1952, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f1.

57 James Sheldon report, Sept. 5, 1952, Marcus Brown to James Sheldon, Sept. 5, 1952, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f1; Dorothy Sheldon’s observations came at a second meeting she attended. Notes by “DBS & SM,” April 4, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 342 f140.

58 “[Unsigned] Report of NRP Meeting, Oct. 17, 1952”; [Unsigned] Reports of NRP Meeting, Oct. 10, 1952,” NSANL Papers, Box 338 f6.

59 Undated mimeographed copy [ca. Dec. 1953–April 1954] of “Handbook for the Elite Guard of the National Renaissance Party,” NSANL Papers, Box 347 f3.

60 Emmanuel Trujillo to Your Excellency the Grand Mufti, April 29, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f15; undated mimeographed copy [ca. Dec. 1953–April 1954] of “Handbook for the Elite Guard of the National Renaissance Party,” NSANL Papers, Box 347 f3.

61 [Unsigned Report but probably Leon Birkhead], Dec. 16, 1952, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f1; New York Times, Jan. 19, 1953.

62 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 77; for Thompson, see Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/THOMPSONHaroldKeithHQ100370871AndHQ10518598/page/n259/mode/2up.

63 “Investigative and Fact-Finding Division of Civil Rights Department,” Jan. 9, 1952, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f4; James Sheldon to Guenther Reinhardt, Aug. 14, 1946, NSANL Papers, Box 303 f8.

64 NRP Meeting, Feb. 21, 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n33/mode/2up; NR Bulletin, May 1953, quoted in George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 55 (New York, 1954), 77.

65 Report, Oct. 16, 1953, NSANL Box 338 f5: for NRP expansion, see Aug. 26, 1953: FBI SAC NY, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n5/mode/2up; for Burke and Madole, see Lanier Waller to Prof. Sheldon, Jan. 13, 1950, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

66 Shoenfeld Report, June 26–27, 1953, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 12 f4; James Sheldon, Report, May 25, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f7; George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 55 (New York, 1954), 77.

67 James Sheldon, Report, May 25, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f7.

CHAPTER 8: GETTING INSIDE THE INTERNATIONAL FASCIST FRONT

1 Emmanuel Trujillo Report, May 29, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f17.

2 Trujillo Report, May 29, 1953.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.; also see Abe Shoenfeld’s subsequent report of the evening event and police station visit, May 29–June 2, 1953, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 12 f6.

6 Trujillo Report, May 29, 1953.

7 Ibid.

8 Trujillo Report, June 14, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f17.

9 Trujillo Report, June 2, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16. For Trujillo’s background, see Emmanuel Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You: My Six Weeks of Free Love with Pat Ward (Philadelphia: Andre Levy, 1955), 155–56. There is disagreement about the precise nature of Trujillo’s military service. Thompson claims Trujillo told him he joined the British Merchant Navy and then enlisted in a U.S. Army Airborne Division in 1948. Matthew Kent, who assumed leadership of the Peyote Way Church of God after Trujillo’s retirement, says that Trujillo was severely wounded during a mission in the North Sea at the very end of the war and suffered “PTSD and traumatic brain injury.” Trujillo’s book, I Love You, I Hate You, also suggests the teenager fought with the British at the end of World War II and with the American forces after World War II. Ancestry.com lists Immanuel Pardeahtan Trujillo as enlisting in the Army on Aug. 26, 1947, and being discharged July 12, 1948. Biographical information is drawn from Ancestry.com; Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You. For Thompson’s account of Trujillo’s background, see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 423–25; Eric Tsetsi, “A Remote Arizona Church Offers Followers Peyote-Induced Psychedelic Trips,” Village Voice, Jan. 8, 2014.

10 Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You, 154–55. For the background of the Jefferson School, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_School_of_Social_Science.

11 Sheldon got the name of her husband wrong. It was Meyer Rosen, not Max Cohen as he thought. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/1862756:61406; Sheldon, Handwritten Notes on Mana Truhill, n.d., NSANL Papers, Box 346 f15.

12 Draft of Truhill Speech, June 1, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f17.

13 Trujillo Report, June 2, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16.

14 New York Post, ca. Sept. 4, 1952, Lyle Stuart Papers, Box 23 f58, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.

15 “BBB” was apparently a British reporter who worked as a spy for Abe Shoenfeld. He occasionally sent Sheldon his observations of NRP street meetings. “Reporter BBB,” Oct. 16, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5. For the attack on Gray, see New York World-Telegram, Jan. 17, 1953.

16 Trujillo Report, June 2, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16.

17 Shoenfeld Report, June 26–27, 1953, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 12 f4.

18 Trujillo Report, June 5, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16. For more on counterdemonstrations, see BBB Report, Oct. 10, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f5; BBB Report, Oct. 16, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f6.

19 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 465n33.

20 Trujillo Report, June 11, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16.

21 Trujillo Report, June 19, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16; also see Trujillo Report, June 12, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16.

22 James Sheldon to Julius L. Goldstein, June 23, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f15; Sheldon Notes, June 22, 1953, typed at bottom of Trujillo Report, June 21, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f10; Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You, 65; also see Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You, 49.

23 Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You, 65, 49; James Sheldon to Julius L. Goldstein, June 23, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f15. For a copy of the oath, see “To Investigative Department from James Sheldon,” ca. 1945, NSANL Papers, Box 309 f18.

24 Trujillo Report, June 5, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346, f16.

25 Trujillo Report, June 19, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f16.

26 Trujillo Report, Nov. 2, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f3; Memo: To Prof Sheldon from Adele Gilead Re: Report on NRP from Emmanuel Trujillo, Aug. 10, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f13.

27 BBB Report, Oct. 10, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5. As for Irene Dovale, the FBI listed her name as Irene Duvalle; other places have it as Irene Dovale, Duval, or Dovalle. For her first public meeting, see Jon Langrod Report, Sept. 25, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f6. Several years later, she recollected that she and Trujillo had shared a mutual interest in motorcycles. FBI Report, April 17, 1957, in report of Jan. 31, 1964, James H. Madole’s National Renaissance Party. Fascist leader Joseph Kamp identified her as Irene Duval and offered further information on her “red” background. Joseph P. Kamp, The Bigots Behind the Swastika Spree (New York: Headlines, 1960), 31. Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

28 “BBB Report,” Oct. 10, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5.

29 Ruth Ross Report, Nov. 4, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f3.

30 Sheldon Memorandum of Conference with FBI, July 29, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f12; Unsigned Report, April 29, 1955, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f11. The bugged telephone line was connected to a tape recorder so that Sheldon had hard evidence of what was discussed. For initial secret taping of meetings, see “Confidential,” Sept. 3, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 344 f18.

31 “BBB Report,” Oct. 2, 1953; “KB Report,” Oct. 21, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5.

32 NSANL News Release: Sheldon Address to 14th Anniversary Dinner of NSANL April 4, 1947, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f20.

33 Remer quoted in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 115; George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB vol. 53 (1952), 141. Rosenfeld offers an excellent overview of the renazification of Germany after World War II.

34 Forster to Epstein, June 17, 1954, in Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 268.

35 Trujillo to Sheldon, Nov. 2, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f3; Weiss quoted in Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 204.

36 Trujillo to Sheldon, Nov. 2, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f3.

37 Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 211, 267, 214–15, 251–52; Goodrick, Black Sun, 77–78.

38 Trujillo Memo, Jan 16, 1954, “Papers torn up by Weiss and put in Manuel’s wastepaper basket,” NSANL Papers, Box 347 f7.

39 Trujillo to Charles Westbrook, Feb. 25, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f10.

40 Truhill to H. Strunk [Dusseldorf], April 13, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f7; in May 1954 he claimed 7,000 members in New York, 700 of whom belonged to the Elite Guard. Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n183/mode/2up.

41 AJYB 53 (1952), 438; AJYB 54 (1953), 303.

42 Otto Mahncke to Mana Truhill, Feb. 23, 1954, Box 343 f6. Mahncke’s original letter in German is in the file along with Trujillo’s translation.

43 Otto Mahncke to Mana Truhill, Feb. 23, 1954, Box 343 f6; Truhill Memo, Feb. 15, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f3; Mahncke to Charles Westbrook, Feb. 13, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f6.

44 Trujillo Memo Regarding Dr. Von Leers, Dec. 29, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 341 f20; “Reporter GEC,” May 28, 1949, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 10 f1. For Leers’s background, see Robert Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (London: Routledge, 1995), 152; “The Postwar Career of Nazi Ideologue Johann von Leers, aka Omar Amin, the ‘First Ranking German’ in Nasser’s Egypt.” Article https://jcpa.org/article/the-postwar-career-of-nazi-ideologue-johann-von-leers-aka-omar-amin-the-first-ranking-german-in-nassers-egypt/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_von_Leers.

45 Leers to Truhill, Feb. 15, and Feb. 10, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f2. For a study of Euro-American contacts among far-right groups on both continents, see Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

46 Gudrun Himmler [Munich] to Truhill, March 6, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 341 f3; for Trujillo’s “Communist-Jew Plot,” see “Mimeo pamphlet,” ca. March–April 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f7.

47 Charles Westbrook to Miss Ross, ca. Feb.–March 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f10; Truhill to Mahncke, Feb. 23, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f7. For examples of Weiss’s financial support, see Mahncke to Truhill, Feb. 13, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f6; Mahncke to Larry Sestito, March 22, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f5; Sestito Report, Aug. 23, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 309 f21; Weiss to Hans-Ulrich Rudel, March 14, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f9.

48 A. Raven Thomson [Mosley secretary] to Jon Langrod, March 16, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 342 f8.

49 Note from James Sheldon to Trujillo, Dec. 29, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f23; Gerhard Krüger to Truhill, Feb. 18, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f6.

50 Friedrich Kuhfuss to Mana Truhill, Jan. 6, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f12.

51 Leers to Truhill, Feb. 25, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f2.

52 Leers to Truhill, March 8, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f2.

53 Announcement, Otto Mahncke, April 20, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f8; Madole to Truhill, June 5, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f4; also see Truhill to H. Strunk [Dusseldorf], April 13, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f7.

54 Urgent Memorandum, Oct. 25, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f13. For Sheldon’s contacts with authorities, see Memorandum of James H. Sheldon, Conference with FBI Regarding NRP and Related Matters, July 29, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f12. The documents included a seven-page secret mailing list of Mahncke’s new party with the names and addresses of 148 key members. Copy of Gemeinschaft SWR mailing list, April 7, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f8.

55 Trujillo Report, May 16, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; also see, FBI SAC Newark to Director, May 11, 1954, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n121/mode/2up; https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n183/mode/2up.

56 Madole to Truhill, June 5, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f4. For his planned meetings with Stoner, Fields, and Westbrook, see Madole to Dr. Edward Fields, June 5, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f4; Charles Westbrook to Truhill, ca. June 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f4.

57 Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n177/mode/2up.

CHAPTER 9: EXPOSED!

1 “How Can I Become a Menace,” Anti-Defamation League Bulletin, Nov. 1953, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-2/page/n71/mode/2up?view=theater.

2 “How Can I Become a Menace.”

3 https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-2/page/n73/mode/2up?view=theater; https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-NYC-2/page/n71/mode/2up?view=theater, both in Lazar Collection,

4 “Dear American,” Letter by James Madole, Dec. 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5.

5 “E. A. Kane Report of Joint NRP Meeting at ANL Office,” Dec. 18, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20. For the Jewish Gestapo quote, see Report of Madole’s Street Speech, Oct. 16, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5.

6 “E. A. Kane Report of Joint NRP Meeting at ANL Office,” Dec. 18, 1953.

7 Einar Aberg to Mana Truhill, Feb. 14, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f10; Otto Mahncke to Mana Truhill, April 22, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f10; Mahncke to Truhill, Feb. 2, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f6.

8 [Truhill] “Important Notice,” Jan. 21, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f7. Langrod joined the NRP in December 1953. Madole to Jon Langrod, Dec. 8, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 779 f58.

9 The agent was an AJC correspondent who shared information with the ADL. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Cross-Currents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956), 247–48.

10 Madole to Truhill, Feb. 2, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f10; Madole to Truhill, Feb. 2, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f10; Madole to Ross, Jan. 17, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f23; FBI Report, New York Office, Aug. 31, 1956, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-1. For Ruth’s desire to take over the NRP, see [JHS] Memo for NRP File, Dec. 28, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 341 f20.

11 George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 56 (New York, 1955), 227.

12 Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” 223.

13 Madole to Charles Westbrook, ca. May 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f3.

14 John W. Hamilton, Natl Citizens Protective Assoc. to Mana Truhill, ca. Jan 1, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 288 f3; Charles Westbrook to Ruth Ross, Feb. 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f9; Westbrook to Truhill, ca. May 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f4; also see Madole to Westbrook, April 20, 1954, Box 336 f24.

15 Millard Grubbs to Mana Truhill, Dec. 3, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 288 f3.

16 For Lanier’s involvement with them and former Columbian James Aiken, see Reports from Waller, Jan. 7, 14, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 305 f7.

17 Trujillo Report, May 16, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20.

18 Madole, “Letter of Introduction,” June 5, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f4.

19 NY Special Agent in Charge, July 14, 1954, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n177/mode/2up.

20 Ibid.

21 James Madole, “God’s Chosen People” [pamphlet], Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n159/mode/2up.

22 NY SAC to J. Edgar Hoover, June 8, 1954, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleHQ6283296/page/n161/mode/2up.

23 Shoenfeld Report, June 10–17, 1954, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f1.

24 For a discussion of the founding of HUAC and hijacking of its mission to investigate fascism and Nazism, see Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017).

25 “NRP leader speaks on Television and Radio,” June–July 1957, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f6.

26 FBI Report, June 16, 1954, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt; full text of “FOIA: Madole, James-HQ-3,” date: Jan 31, 1964; date searched July 16, 2024, James H. Madole’s National Renaissance Party, both in Lazar Collection.

27 Memorandum of James Sheldon, July 29, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f12.

28 Larry Sestito, Elizabeth NJ, to Mana Truhill, Dec. 19, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f18.

29 Abe Shoenfeld Report, July 6, 1954, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f1.

30 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 428 n33, 457.

31 H. Keith Thompson, “I Am an American Fascist,” Exposé 33 (August 1954), 34 (September 1954), 35 (Oct. 1954), and 36 (November 1954). For Thompson’s background, see James Sheldon, “Neo-Nazi to Run for Congress in Yorkville,” May 25, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f7; Forster and Epstein, Cross-Currents, 204–6.

32 Thompson, “American Fascist,” Exposé 35 (Oct. 1954), 9.

33 Thompson, “American Fascist,” Exposé 36 (Nov. 1954), 4.

34 Report on Meeting of Patriots for McCarthy Under the Auspices of the NRP, Oct. 15, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 298 f26.

35 Mahncke Statement, Hamburg, Oct. 14, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 309 f21.

36 Committee on Un-American Activities, Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Dec. 17, 1954), 10.

37 Abe Shoenfeld, “My Reflections on the KKK Situation,” Jan. 28, 1952, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 7 f13; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Dec. 17, 1954.

38 HUAC, Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups, 5. For Hoover’s repeated refusal to place major American Nazi leaders under surveillance, despite doing so for suspected Communists, see Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles. Instances of antisemitism can be found in the FBI records pertaining to the NRP in the Ernie Lazar collection.

39 HUAC, Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups, 8, 19.

40 James Madole to Max Nelsen, Jan. 31, 1955, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f2; James Madole, “A Reply to Nationalist Critics of the National Renaissance Party,” NR Bulletin, Aug. 1955.

41 Trujillo to Sheldon, Nov. 23, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 435 f1.

42 Emmanuel Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You: My Six Weeks of Free Love with Pat Ward (Philadelphia: Andre Levy, 1955), 65, 14, 66. For other accounts of the scandal, see Time, March 9, 1953; Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 444–448n29; FBI Report, Special Agent in Charge, NY, Oct. 19, 1954, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NationalRenaissancePartyJamesMadoleNYC1056112/page/n23/mode/2up.

43 Trujillo, I Love You, I Hate You, 119, 125.

44 Trujillo, 119, 125.

45 Trujillo, 150.

46 Shoenfeld Report, June 10–17, 1954, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f1; “Reporter B,” Sept. 6, 1955, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f4. For Weiss continuing to pay Trujillo, see Trujillo to Sheldon, Aug. 16, 1955, NSANL Papers, Box 346 f15.

47 Trujillo to Sheldon, Aug. 16, 1955.

48 The Gazette (Montreal), Jan. 4, 1956; “Reporter W,” July 13, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f4. For other Trujillo sightings, see Sestito Report, Aug. 8, 1961, NSANL Papers, Box 310 f15. For Pat Ward rejoining the NRP, see Shoenfeld Report, June 21, 1961, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f2.

49 “1328 Peyote Way Church of God,” Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions, ed. J. Gordon Melton, 9th ed., vol. 1: United States (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cenage Learning, 2017), 713–14; Eric Tsetsi, “A Remote Arizona Church Offers Followers Peyote-Induced Psychedelic Trips,” Village Voice, Jan. 8. 2014.

50 Shoenfeld Report, July 12–14, 1954, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f1.

51 James Madole to Max Nelsen (Chicago), May 10, 1955, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 13 f2.

CHAPTER 10: BLACK MONDAY AND THE FORGING OF A NEW AMERICAN FASCIST FRONT

1 Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 151.

2 Greene, 149.

3 Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 31. For overviews of the rise of WCCs, see Stan Opotowsky, Dixie Dynamite: The Inside Story of White Citizens Councils (New York: NAACP, 1957), originally published as a series by the New York Post, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/white-citizens-council-movement/page/n83/mode/2up. See also David Halberstam, “The White Citizens Councils: Respectable Means for Unrespectable Ends,” Commentary (Oct. 1956); James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 266–72; John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

4 For estimates of WCC membership, see George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 59 (1958), 49; Entry for White Citizens Council, https://participedia.net/organization/310; Milton Ellerin, “Rightist Extremism,” AJYB 66 (1965),199.

5 For “Reporter B” traveling South, see “Reporter B,” Nov. 17, 1957, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15, f2.

6 Quotes and statistics are taken from Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 391; Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 44, 52.

7 Anti-Defamation League correspondence, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/white-citizens-council-movement/page/n95/mode/2up?view=theater; Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation” AJYB 58 (1957), 144; the “dirty-collar crowd” quote is from Drew Pearson, Denver Post, Dec. 4, 1958.

8 Quoted in ADL biographical sketch of Fields, https://web.archive.org/web/20071017043725/http://adl.org/learn/ext_us/Fields.asp?xpicked=2&item=Fields.

9 For Fields’s background, see Ancestry.com; Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 159; Greene, Temple Bombing, 156–57; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Reed_Fields. For his early correspondence with Madole, handwritten memo: L. W. [Lanier Waller], Dalton, Georgia, Dec. 26, 1949, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4; “Report NRP: Lanier Waller to Prof. Sheldon,” Jan. 13, 1950, NSANL Papers, Box 347 f4.

10 Quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 157; Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Christian_Patriots_Crusade-F._Allen_Mann-Chicago-1/page/n57/mode/1up?view=theater.

11 Quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 157–58.

12 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 19, 1954.

13 Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Bombing_of_Atlanta_Temple_1958-Chicago-1/page/n106/mode/1up?view=theater.

14 Emmanuel Trujillo Report, Aug. 23, 1953, NSANL Papers, Box 343 f1.

15 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Aug. 18, 1954; Thunderbolt, May 1954, quoted in New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 20, 1960; also see George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 56 (1955), 223; Peter L. Xavier, “Christian Anti-Jewish Party Stages Picket Line Before White House,” Women’s Voice, Oct. 1954.

16 For a discussion of the Black–Jewish alliance in the twentieth century, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4; Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018).

17 The more prominent groups included the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the National Association for the Advancement and Protection of the White Race, the National Association for the Advancement and Protection of the Majority of White People, the Chicago-based Realpolitical Institute, the St. Louis National Citizens Protective Association, the Chicago Committee of the Northern Friends of the South, and two militant Ku Klux Klan organizations—the U.S. Klans and Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 57 (1956), 183–84.

18 Fields quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 42. For the backgrounds of these men and groups, see Newton, 42.

19 John J. Rich Report, March 20, 1958 on meeting of March 16, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; Fields to Madole, Nov. 15, 1957, in “Reporter B,” Nov. 20, 1957, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f2; FBI Report Vincent J. Ascherl Re: James Madole, Nov. 29, 1963, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-2/page/n203/mode/2up. John J. Rich was a pseudonym for longtime NRP member Joe Rudden.

20 Newton, National States Rights Party, 43; also see Abraham Shoenfeld Report, Jan 18–19, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f1; William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1999), 29.

21 For Agent B learning about Southern developments from Madole’s meetings and Southern delegates, see “Reporter B,” May 23, 1957, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f2; May 1, 1958, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f5.

22 Webb, Fight Against Fear, 52.

23 Stoner letter to the editor, Chicago Defender, June 27, 1957; Webb, Rabble Rousers, 164.

24 Chicago Defender, May 22 and June 27, 1957. Before leaving office in January 2025, President Joseph Biden issued a posthumous pardon to Marcus Garvey. https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-joe-bidens-last-minute-pardons-marcus-garvey-2017376.

25 Chicago Defender, Sept. 6, 1959.

26 Newton, National States Rights Party, 43, 47; Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 118–20. For the FBI’s monitoring of the NSRP, see two reports published in a single volume, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National States Rights Party—The FBI Files, Monographs and Attorney General Letter. This contains FBI reports from May 1970 and August 1966.

27 FBI, “White Extremist Organizations Part II: National States Rights Party,” May 1970, in National States Rights Party—The FBI Files. This is a valuable document for providing a look at how the FBI viewed Stoner, Fields, and the NSRP. For the rise of the NSRP, see Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard; Newton, National States Rights Party; Newton, White Robes.

28 California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, Para-Military Organizations in California (California Department of Justice: Sacramento, 1965), Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/paramilitary-orgs-in-california-1965-84p/mode/2up.

29 Quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 228. For a copy of the NSRP constitution, see 209–32.

30 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 162. For more on Swift and the Christian Identity movement, see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Swift. For additional sources on Christian Identity, see sources in Chapter 6n10.

31 George and Wilcox, Nazi, Communists, Klansmen, 384; Newton, National States Rights Party, 50. For a copy of the NSRP’s 1958 constitution and by-laws and first quote, see Newton, 209–232.

32 George and Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, 384; Newton, National States Rights Party, 50; Kellman to Bernheim, Sept. 26, 1958, “Report of the Fact-Finding Division for Sept. 1958,” MS-780 Box A13 f5; for a photo of the banner praising Christ, see FBI, “National States Rights Party, August 1966.” For far-right accusations that Brown v. Board of Education was the product of Jews and communists controlling the American government, see Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard.

33 Denver Post, Dec. 4, 1958.

34 Newton, National States Rights Party, 50; Greene, Temple Bombing, 161–62.

35 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 465 n33; AJC Report, Bigotry in Action: Organized Anti-Semitism in the United States Today (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1963), 13; Webb, Rabble Rousers, 161.

36 Newton, National States Rights Party, 229.

37 Newton, 50; Report of the Florida Legislative Investigating Committee (Tallahassee: Florida Legislative Investigative Committee, 1965), 69.

38 Quote from Preamble to NSRP Constitution in Newton, National States Rights Party, 209.

CHAPTER 11: BOMBS, SYNAGOGUES, CHURCHES, AND THE AGE OF TERROR

1 New York Times, Oct. 13, 1958.

2 George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 60 (1959), 44; Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 163; Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 59 (1958), 106–7.

3 National Renaissance Bulletin, Aug. and Sept. 1957; Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 5; “Eisenhower Sets Up a Military Dictatorship in Arkansas,” NR Bulletin (Aug. and Sept. 1957); Black ministers subjected to violence included Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Pastor George Dickerson, both of Birmingham. For chronological descriptions of the bombing campaign, see https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/List_of_racially-motivated_bombings; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_against_African-American_churches#cite_note-Alabama_Media_Group-2.

4 Edwin J. Lukas to Dr. John Slawson (AJC), Aug. 1, 1958, http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx; Greene, Temple Bombing, 182; Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 60 (1959), 44–45; Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens, Ga and London: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 55.

5 Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 60 (1959), 50.

6 AJC, Bigotry in Action: Organized Anti-Semitism in the United States Today (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1958), 11–12; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 18, 1958.

7 New York Times, March 17, 1958; AJC, Bigotry in Action, 11–12; also see Kellman to Bernheim, April 30, 1958, “Report of the Fact-Finding Division for April 1958,” AJC Archives, MS-780 Box A13 f5; Webb, Fight Against Fear, 54.

8 For a closer look at the Montgomery boycott and similar actions during this era, see David J. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Juan Williams, Eyes on The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (New York: Penguin Books, 1988); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988; New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1989).

9 Botnick quoted in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Edward Goldberger et al., vol 4, part IVa (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 27. For other examples, see ADL Report to FBI, Nov. 6, 1956, in Date: Jan 31, 1964, James H. Madole’s National Renaissance Party. Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

10 Burnett Roth, in Goldberger, et al., eds., “Not the Work of a Day,” vol. 4, part IVa, 64; Author telephone interview with David Epstein, May 17, 2024.

11 Benjamin Epstein Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Oscar Cohen and Stanley Wexler, vol. 1 (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), iii; Greene, Temple Bombing, 183; Alexander Miller Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Nathan C. Belth, Alexander F. Miller, and Lester J. Waldman, vol. 5, part B, 96, 97.

12 Lester Waldman Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day,” eds. Belth, Miller, and Waldman, vol. 5, part C, 54–55, 87–88.

13 Benjamin Epstein Oral Memoir, in “Not the Work of a Day,” eds. Cohen and Wexler, vol. 1, 126 102; Miller Oral Memoir in “Not the Work of a Day,” vol. 5, part B, 104.

14 Stetson Kennedy to James Sheldon, Jan. 19, 1951, NSANL Papers, Box 325 f16; Arnold Forster to Stetson Kennedy, Oct. 23, 1950, https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/SKennedy/id/1156/rec/4; Lanier Waller to James Sheldon, Jan. 12, 1955, NSANL Papers, Box 435 f5. For Kennedy’s activities during the 1950s, see Stetson Kennedy, I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Arco Publishers, 1954).

15 For Hoff’s background, see Newton, National States Rights Party, 144. For Sheldon’s reports on Fields, see Agent 27 (John J. Rich) to Sheldon, March 20, 1958, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; Rich to Sheldon, Dec. 23, 1958, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f19; Rich to Sheldon, Nov. 30, 1959, Box 335 f18; “Reporter W,” Sept. 29, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1.

16 Information on Kellman’s background is drawn from Depts. and Div. Investigative & Fact-Finding, Edwin Lukas to Louis Friedman, June 8, 1950: Reincorporation of Investigative and Fact-Finding Division into the Civil Rights Department as of June 1, 1950, AJC Archives, Box A-13, MS-780; Ancestry.com; and from author interviews with his son Barnet Kellman, Oct. 26, 2022 and March 26, 2024, Los Angeles.

17 Dept. of Program Resources, Fact-Finding Division, Program Statement for 1955, AJC Archives MS-780 Box A-13 f2; AJC, D&D: Investigative and Fact-Finding Division: Oct. 30, 1951, AJC Archives, MS-780, Box A-13 f2; Fact-Finding Division, Program Statement and Budget: 1957, AJC Archives, MS-780 Box A-13 f2.

18 George Kellman and Sylvia Edelman to S. Andhil Fineberg, June 13, 1956, ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/3869.

19 Author interview with Barnet Kellman, Oct. 26, 2022, Los Angeles.

20 George Kellman, “Staff Seminar: Overt Anti-Semitism,” Jan. 15, 1962, 2, ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/3784; Shoenfeld Report, March 17, 1958, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f6.

21 “Reporter B,” June 2, 1958, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f5; Rich Report, May 16, 1960, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f6. For Kamp, Rich Report, March 17, 1960, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f18; for Stoner, Larry Keller, “Junkyard Dog” [SPLC], Intelligence Report (Spring 2010), March 2, 2010, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2010/junkyard-dog.

22 Agent 27 [John J. Rich] to Sheldon, Sept. 22, 1958, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f18.

23 Edwin J. Lukas to Dr. John Slawson (AJC), Aug. 1, 1958, http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx; Shoenfeld Report, March 19, 1958, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f6. For Ellerin’s background, see Interview with Milton Ellerin, Sept. 1980, AJC Oral History project, 21, New York Public Library; Marianne R. Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007), 12; https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/thehour/name/milton-ellerin-obituary?id=23110773.

24 Newton, National States Rights Party, 52–53; also see Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 2, 1958.

25 “Statement of Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety, Made at 2:00 P.M., July 16, 1958, in Room 315, City Hall Building,” Birmingham, Alabama, Police Department surveillance files, quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 228.

26 “Testimony of Captain G. L. Pattie, Birmingham Police Department, Interview with Mr. ‘S’ on Saturday, June 21, 1958,” quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 228–30; for the sting operation, also see Newton, National States Rights Party, 52–55.

27 Newton, 55.

28 “Testimony of Captain G. L. Pattie,” quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 230–31.

29 FBI report quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 56.

30 Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong, 160. For Till’s story, see Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017); Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2015).

31 Greene, The Temple Bombing, 5.

32 See “Ministers’ Manifesto,” https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/ministers-manifesto/. For Rothschild’s deep involvement in the Civil Rights movement, see Greene, Temple Bombing.

33 Immediately after the bombing, ADL head Benjamin Epstein sent Lester Waldman to Atlanta to lead an investigation; they came up with nine names, which they sent to police and the FBI. Three of the men on that list were arrested for the bombing. Waldman in “Not the Work of a Day,” vol. 5, part C, 88. For the most comprehensive history of the events surrounding the Atlanta bombings, see Greene, Temple Bombing.

34 Greene, 148.

35 Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 60 (1959), 46. On the FBI’s involvement, see Greene, Temple Bombing, 246.

36 “Statement of Kenneth Chester Griffin, Oct. 13, 1958, signed, witnessed by Perry and Strickland,” quoted in Greene, Temple Bombing, 283.

37 New York Times, Oct. 18, 1958; for Stoner and Nacirema, see Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 163.

38 Greene, Temple Bombing, 273; Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 61 (1960), 42–43; New York Times, Dec. 11, 1958.

39 Kellman to Bernheim, Dec. 30, 1958, “Report of the Fact-Finding Division for Dec. 1958,” MS-780 Box A13 f5; Greene, Temple Bombing, 298.

40 Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Bombing_of_Atlanta_Temple_1958-Chicago-1/page/n113/mode/1up?view=theater; Newton, National States Rights Party, 59.

41 “Status of Jews in the South,” Sept. 8, 1958: Memo from Kellman’s Fact-Finding Division,” http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx.

42 Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 492–94.

43 Anti-Semitism/AJC file, AJC Subject Files Collection. Reports and memoranda on antisemitism in America and AJC’s work to combat it, 1960–1962. (8) (1960) http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx; October 1960: “Saturday Session: Executive Board Anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Problems Dealing with It,” in Anti-Semitism/AJC file, AJC Subject Files Collection. Reports and memoranda on antsemitism in America and AJC’s work to combat it, 1960–1962. (8) (1960) http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx. All citations in this note are from the American Jewish Committee online archives.

44 Shoenfeld Oral History Transcript, 1965, 1974 [2 of 2], Shoenfeld Papers, Box 5A f11, 174.

45 AJC Fact-Finding Division, Program Emphases Statement for 1961, January 1961, AJC Archives, MS-780 Box A-13 f2; Fields quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 68.

46 AJC Memo, “Southern Research Is Needed Because,” Dec. 10, 1959, ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/4122.

47 A copy of the NSRP’s “Why Vote States Rights” (1960) can be found in Newton, National States Rights Party, 233–35.

48 NSRP Constitution cited in Newton, National States Rights Party, 209.

49 NR Bulletin, March–April 1958, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f7.

50 FBI SAC Atlanta to Director, Sept. 1, 1959, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.HQ15797161191pp/page/n41/mode/2up; Larry Keller, “Junkyard Dog” [SPLC], Intelligence Report (Spring 2010), March 2, 2010 https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2010/junkyard-dog.

51 October 1960: Saturday Session: Executive Board “Anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Problems Dealing with It,” in Anti-Semitism/AJC file, AJC Subject Files Collection. Reports and memoranda on antisemitism in America and AJC’s work to combat it, 1960–1962. (8) (1960) ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx.

52 Newton, National States Rights Party, 72.

CHAPTER 12: THE MOST MEDIA-SAVVY NAZI IN AMERICA

1 George Lincoln Rockwell, This Time the World, 7th ed. (York, SC: Liberty Bell Publications, 2004), 22, 37, 36. For Rockwell’s biographical background, see William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1999); Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Federal Bureau of Investigation, American Nazi Party Monograph (Washington, D.C., June 1965), 1–3. This publication can be accessed online or in a printed version: https://vault.fbi.gov/American%20Nazi%20Party%20/American%20Nazi%20Party%20Part%2001/view; Federal Bureau of Investigation, American Nazi Party Monograph—The FBI Files Paperback (reprint: np: High Quality Paperback, 2009).

2 Rockwell, This Time the World, 37, 19.

3 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 9; Rockwell, This Time the World, 71.

4 Schmaltz, Hate, 15–18; Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 18–21.

5 Rockwell, This Time the World, 141; for the encounter with Smith, see Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 9.

6 Rockwell, This Time the World, 154–55.

7 Schmaltz, Hate, 62.

8 Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 42; https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/United_White_Party.

9 Rockwell quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 30; also see Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 26–28.

10 Schmaltz, Hate, 33; Rockwell, This Time the World, 293. The ADL apparently contacted their office in Washington, D.C., and asked for pictures of the demonstration.

11 John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 56.

12 Martin Durham, White Rage: The Extreme Right in American Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 20, 21.

13 For the assassination attempt, see Martin Kerr, “Neo-Nazi Article on NRP and Madole: Part II.” For Rockwell’s initial contacts with Madole, see Oct. 1958 entry, FBI Report Vincent J. Ascherl Re: James Madole, Nov. 29, 1963, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-2/page/n199/mode/2up; Oct. 29, 1958, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/page/n29/mode/2up; Dec. 20, 1958, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

14 William Goring quoted in FBI Report, Dec. 20, 1958, FBI Report, Jan. 28, 1959, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

15 Rockwell, This Time the World, 308.

16 “Program of the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists,” NSANL Papers, Box 247 f6; for the early history of the ANP, see FBI, American Nazi Party: Monograph, 10–15.

17 “Program of the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists,” NSANL Papers, Box 247 f6.

18 Ibid.; FBI, American Nazi Party Monograph, 17.

19 “Program of the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists,” NSANL Papers, Box 247 f6.

20 Ibid.; Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 34.

21 Atlanta Journal, Oct. 17, 1958.

22 Rockwell Report, Jan. 3, 1962, NSANL Papers, Box 247 f7.

23 Ibid. For conservative politics in the 1950s and ’60s, see Matthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (New York: Basic Books, 2023); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

24 George and Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, 358; Rockwell, This Time the World, 111; George and Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, 354.

25 “American Nazi Party,” in California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, Para-Military Organizations in California (California Department of Justice: Sacramento, 1965), 16, 19, 18.

26 Quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 48.

27 Rockwell quoted in Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 33.

28 Rockwell, This Time the World, 193.

29 Shoenfeld Report, July 13, 1961, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 7 f9.

30 Rockwell, This Time the World, 192; “The US Right Wing Picture,” one-page flyer from the Rockwell Report, Goring Papers, 1962–1970, Box 1 f7.

31 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1962), 63, 183.

32 Boorstin, The Image, 204.

33 John Kennedy and George Wallace also understood the power of television early on and used it on their behalf.

34 Boorstin, The Image, 186; Rockwell quoted in Zander Hollander, “Fiasco for a Fuehrer,” ADL Bulletin (April 1959), in Goring Papers, Box 1 f6.

35 Rockwell quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 103; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 12, 1960; New York Times, June 23, 1960; Agent 27 (John J. Rich) Report, June 16, 1960, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20.

36 Jan. 1961, AJC Fact-Finding Committee, “Program Emphases for 1961,” AJC Archives, MS 780, Box A13 f4; Rockwell quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 170.

37 Rockwell, This Time the World, 374.

38 October 1960: Saturday Session: Executive Board “Anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Problems in Dealing with It,” in Anti-Semitism/AJC file, AJC Subject Files Collection. Reports and memoranda on antisemitism in America and AJC’s work to combat it, 1960–1962. (8) (1960) http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx; Rockwell, This Time the World, 375.

39 The meeting is described in Schmaltz, Hate, 51.

40 Schmaltz, Hate, 119; Rockwell Report, Jan. 1, 1962, 4. For rumors of Rockwell establishing an ANP “Negro section,” see Feb. 25, 1960 report in Jan. 31, 1964; James H. Madole’s National Renaissance Party, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

41 Schmaltz, Hate, 133.

42 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 23, 1961.

43 Durham, White Rage, 20–21.

44 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 1, 1961. On Holocaust survivors carrying razor blades, see Bernard Mintz Oral History in “Not the Work of a Day,” Goldberger et al., eds., vol. 4, 25.

45 “Agent W,” Report March 8, 1962, March 9, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f1. For Rockwell’s record company, see https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/03/25/hate-bus-came-town/.

46 New York Times, May 26, 1963.

47 FBI, American Nazi Party Monograph, ii.

48 October 1960: Saturday Session: Executive Board “Anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Problems in Dealing with It,” in Anti-Semitism/AJC file, AJC Subject Files Collection. Reports and memoranda on antisemitism in America and AJC’s work to combat it, 1960–1962. (8) (1960) http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 15, 1961.

49 Ulasewicz quoted in Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 37.

50 Rockwell quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 169; Rich Report, March 9, 1961, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f5.

51 William “Butch” Goring quoted in Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Automedia, 1999), 486n6.

52 Report on NRP Meeting in Henry Hudson Hotel, April 27, 1962, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f13. William Goring’s spy activities can be found in the NSANL Papers and the Goring Papers.

53 “Reporter W,” May 30, 1963, Box 20 f2; “Reporter W,” Oct. 13, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1; for Hoff, http://niksnest.blogspot.com/2007/04/nazi-icon-part-african-american.html; also see entry for William Herbert Hoff Jr. in ancestry.com.

54 Goring Report, Dec. 8, 1962, Goring Papers, Box 1 f6; George Lincoln Rockwell, “Mass Circulation Letter,” April 26, 1962, NSANL Papers, Box 247 f7.

55 “Reporter W,” June 8, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2.

56 Rich Report, Dec. 9, 1960, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f5; also see Rich Report, Jan. 10, 1961, in NSANL Papers; FBI Informant Report, Oct. 31, 1960, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt; also see Rich Report, May 14, 1960, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f8.

57 Rich Report, May 5, 1960, Box 340 f8; Rich Report, May 16, 1960, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f6. For Rockwell’s accusations regarding Weiss, see Shoenfeld Report, Jan. 18–19, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f1.

58 The patron saint quote was from a reporter who covered the FBI; quoted in Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (New York: Viking, 2022), 509. Rockwell quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 129; FBI statistics cited in Newton, 128. For histories of COINTELPRO, see Nelson Blackstock, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 1988); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2022); Gage, G-Man, 455–65.

59 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 129. The articles appeared in the August 6, 1962, issue of the Thunderbolt. Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 47, 154n14; also see, Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 512n8

60 Shoenfeld Report, Nov. 7, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1; AJC Archives MS-780 Box A-13 f1. For Burke’s new activities, see Shoenfeld Report, Nov. 7, 1962, Jan. 30, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1, f3.

61 Shoenfeld Report, Aug. 16, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f3; Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 510; Bigotry in Action: Organized Anti-Semitism in the United States Today (New York: AJC, 1963) http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/DigitalArchive.aspx.

62 Shoenfeld Report, Oct. 18, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1; R. B. Report, Oct. 27, 1962, NSANL Papers, Box 337 f1.

CHAPTER 13: STREET ACTIONS: THE BATTLE FOR WHITE CASTLE, THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON, AND BOMBS IN BIRMINGHAM

1 George Lincoln Rockwell, “The U.S. Right Wing Picture,” Rockwell Report, Jan. 15, 1962.

2 Shoenfeld Report, Nov. 7, 1962, Shoenfeld Report, Jan. 30, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1, f3.

3 “Reporter W,” May 16, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2.

4 Rich Report, Feb. 8, 1963, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f18; “Reporter W,” Feb. 8, 1963, March 8, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f3.

5 NRP Flyer, “America First” rally, Feb. 1963, Goring Papers, Box 1 f10.

6 New York Times, May 26, 1963.

7 New York Times, May 26, 1963; “Reporter W,” May 25, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2.

8 “Reporter W,” May 25, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2; Stars and Stripes, May 28, 1963.

9 For video footage of several NRP demonstrations during the early to mid-1960s, see https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_33bb8b62-786f-4700-8aac-1f410360bb8a/; https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_a29acd4e-f478-4f47-997b-d390d049f374/; https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_91f10369-6b48-422e-878a-dfafe1462518/.

10 “Reporter W,” May 25, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2. In addition to the New York Times, stories appeared in the front section of the Boston Globe, May 26, 1963; Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, May 26, 1963; Washington Post, May 26, 1963; Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1963; Baltimore Sun, May 26, 1963; Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 27, 1963; Toronto Daily Star, May 27 and 29, 1963; Jerusalem Post, May 26, 1963; South China Post, May 27, 1963; Long Island Press, June 7, 1963; and many other periodicals here and abroad.

11 “Reporter W,” July 9, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f4.

12 New York Times, July 8, 1963.

13 For general coverage of the picketing and ensuing violence, see New York Times, July 8, 1963; Chicago Defender, July 9, 1963; New York Amsterdam News, July 13, 1963.

14 New York Amsterdam News, July 13, 1963.

15 Rich Report, July 10, 1963, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f1.

16 New York Daily News, July 15, 1963. For further coverage, see New York Times, July 15–20, 1963; New York Post, July 15, 1963.

17 New York Times, July 15, 1963; James Sheldon, “Bronx Jury Finds 8 Neo-Nazis Guilty,” July 1963, NSANL Papers, Box 334 f1.

18 Rich Report, Feb. 8, 1963, NSANL Papers, Box 335 f18. For a transcript of the subsequent court case against five NRP defendants, see “The People of the State of New York against Edward Cassidy, Paul Joachim, Peter Krauss, James H. Madole, Anthony Wells, held between May 4 and June 10, 1964,” in Records and Briefs New York State Appellate Division.

19 Rockwell Report, June 15, 1963; “Reporter W,” May 23, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20, f2; FBI Report, Vincent J. Ascherl, Re: James Madole, Nov. 29, 1963, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-2/page/n199/mode/2up; Shoenfeld Report, Aug. 23, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f5.

20 Rockwell quoted in Globe and Mail (Toronto), Aug. 13, 1963.

21 For an excellent overview of the Birmingham struggles and King’s involvement, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

22 For a discussion of the March on Washington and Belafonte’s efforts to organize Hollywood support for King, see Branch, Parting the Waters; Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 216–17, 284–87; Thomas Gentile, March on Washington: August 28, 1963 (n.p.: New Day Publications, 1983); William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: Norton, 2013).

23 Rockwell quoted in Globe and Mail (Toronto), July 11, 1963.

24 Washington Post, Aug. 12, 22, 1963.

25 Shoenfeld Report, Aug. 13, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f5.

26 Boston Globe, Aug. 20, 1963.

27 Chicago Defender, July 22, 1963.

28 Rockwell quoted in William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1999), 185. For police and National Guard presence, see Washington Post, Aug. 28, 1963.

29 Washington Post, Aug. 29, 1963.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid. Stories about Rockwell’s failed counterdemonstration appeared in newspapers throughout the country. For overviews of the day, see Schmaltz, Hate, 166–97; Gentile, March on Washington; Jones, March on Washington.

32 Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 9; FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Atlanta: Confederate Underground [and Stoner], Sept. 26, 1958, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/ConfederateUndergroundHQ10570219/page/n13/mode/2up. For Stoner’s involvement with the Confederate Underground described in Chapter 11, see FBI Atlanta Office Report, Sept. 18, 1958: Confederate Underground, https://archive.org/details/ConfederateUndergroundHQ10570219/page/n31/mode/2up; F. J. Baumgardner to A. H. Belmont, Oct. 16, 1958: Confederate Underground, https://archive.org/details/ConfederateUndergroundHQ10570219/page/n19/mode/2up; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Stoner.

33 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 167; J. B. Stoner Testimony Before Congress, Activities of Ku Klux Klan in the U.S., p. 3804, Post 1965, https://civilrights.flagler.edu/digital/collection/p16000coll4/id/1216; Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 138; Webb, Rabble Rousers, 168.

34 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 167.

35 George McMillan, “The Birmingham Church Bomber,” Saturday Evening Post, June 6, 1954; Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 95.

36 Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Austin American-Statesman, Atlanta Constitution, all Sept. 23, 1963.

37 Quoted in George McMillan, “The Birmingham Church Bomber,” Saturday Evening Post, June 6, 1964, 15–19; Newton, National States Rights Party, 97; Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n43/mode/2up. For FBI involvement, see Newton, National States Rights Party, 97; Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n37/mode/2up.

38 Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 24, 1963; Newton, White Robes, 138; Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 20, 1963.

39 Newton, National States Rights Party, 98; New York Times, Sept. 6, 1963, Oct. 30, 1985; Newton, 95.

CHAPTER 14: JEWISH NAZIS, DEAD NAZIS, AND THE END OF GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL

1 William Goring Report, ca. Feb. 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f4.

2 Goring Report, ca. Feb. 14, 1964; Second set of handwritten notes, Goring Report, Feb. 21, 1964, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f13; “Reporter W,” Dec. 14, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 21 f1; also see FBI Report, Dec. 31, 1963, Jan. 3, 1964, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt; Goring Report, Feb. 21, 1964, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f13.

3 J. K. Warner, The Real Hate Mongers: The ADL (n.p.: Sons of Liberty, 1963); Goring Report, Jan. 23, 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f7. For the formation of an NRP branch in New Paltz, see Goring, Handwritten Notes, Feb. 21, 1964, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f13.

4 James Boyack Report, June 14, 1964, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f2.

5 James H. Sheldon to President John A. Middleton, May 2, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 9 f8.

6 James Sheldon, “‘Rightist’ Danger Increasing, Their Own Directory Shows,” American Examiner, July 1, 1965. The directory Sheldon referred to was the Alert Americans Association, First National Directory of “Rightist” Groups, Publications and Some Individuals in the United States and Some Foreign Countries (Sausalito, CA: Noontide Press, 1962–1963), 4th ed., NSANL Papers, Box 256 f2.

7 For a sampling of undercover observations by “Reporter W,” see “Reporter W,” Jan. 30, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f3.

8 Sheldon’s long-term spies included Larry Sestito, the heartsick lover of Irene Dovale; Joe Rudden and Louis Mostaccio, who had been with Madole since the early 1950s (Rudden signed his reports John Rich to cover his identity); and Jon Langrod, who also began spying in the 1950s. He had at least a dozen more spies he relied on for occasional reports.

9 William Goring, “To Whom It May Concern,” Dec. 30, 1963, Goring Papers, Box 1 f1; also see Madole to Goring, Dec. 3 and 16, 1962, in Goring Papers, Box 1 f12. Goring also passed on information to the FBI, Goring, “To Whom It May Concern,” Dec. 30, 1963, Goring Papers, Box 1 f1. For Goring’s background, see his obituary in Hartford Courant, Aug. 3, 2019.

10 “Reporter W,” May 2, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2.

11 William Goring, “To Whom It May Concern,” Dec. 30, 1963. For Goring leading the Overseas Division, see Agent BG to Sheldon, Jan. 31, 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f16.

12 Goring handwritten notes, n.d., Goring Papers, Box 1 f6.

13 For one example, see Goring’s notes taken from Madole’s files dated Jan. 13, 1950. Goring Papers, Box 1 f6; see subsequent pages for more notes.

14 James H. Sheldon, “Yorkville Nazis and Black Jingoists in Odd Alliance,” American Examiner, Dec. 26, 1963, Goring Papers, Box 1 f7; James Sheldon, typed notes, Jan. 4 and 11, 1964, NSANL Papers, Box 309 f18. For a description of one of Madole’s visits to Addison’s Black Muslim church in the Bronx, see “Reporter W,” Dec. 15, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 21 f2.

15 Robert Burros to Goring, late Jan. 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f4; Goring to Robert Burros, ca. Dec. 1964, in Goring Papers, Box 1 f4. For an overview of Goring’s spy activities, see William Goring, “To Whom It May Concern,” Dec. 30, 1963. Sheldon forwarded his reports to Army Intelligence. The Department of the Army, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff For Intelligence, Feb. 18, 1966, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

16 Wallace Butterworth to Goring, Jan. 20, ca. Feb. 14, 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f16, f4; Goring to Sheldon, Jan. 22, 1964, in Goring Papers, Box 1 f7; Goring to Robert Burros, Jan. 29, 1965, in Goring Papers, Box 1 f5.

17 New York Times, Oct. 31, 1965; quote taken from A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, One More Victim: The Life and Death of a Jewish Nazi (New York: New American Library, 1967), 53. For an overview of Burros’s life, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Burros.

18 For an overview of Patler’s life, see Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 132–36; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Patsalos#cite_ref-lawrence_3-1.

19 Patler to [name blacked out], June 9, 1962, Goring Papers, Box 1 f14; quoted in Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 135.

20 “Reporter W,” Jan. 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f1; for dissension in the ANP, see Goring handwritten notes, April 13, 1963, Goring Papers, Box 1 f6.

21 The first two quotes are in Goring Report, June 9, 1962, Goring Papers, Box 1 f14; Goring handwritten note, n.d., Goring Papers, Box 1 f6.

22 “Reporter W,” Dec. 28, 1961, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f1; Patler to [name blacked out], June 9, 1962, Goring Papers, Box 1 f1. For Koehl’s and Holstein’s Jewish roots, see William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1999), 227; Patler to [name blacked out], June 9, 1962.

23 Rockwell Report, Jan. 16, 1962, NSANL Papers, Box 247 f7.

24 Quoted in Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim, 149; “Reporter W,” Dec. 28, 1961, Sept. 6, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 19 f1.

25 “Reporter W,” May 16, 1963, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f2; also see, Shoenfeld Report, Oct. 18, 1962, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 20 f1.

26 Quotes taken from Burros’s article “The Jew in America” that appeared in the Free American, Dec. 1963; James Madole, “The Historical and Metaphysical Roots of the Conflict Between Jew and Gentile,” NR Bulletin, June–Sept. 1965, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f8. Copies of the Free American and the International Nazi Fascist can be found in NSANL Papers, Box 214 f30. For a more complete portrait of Burros’s life and death, see Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim.

27 Report [probably Butch Goring], Oct. 25, 1965, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f1; Goring Report, Feb. 22, 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f7.

28 Schmaltz, Hate, 198.

29 Agent BG Report, “To Anti-Nazi League,” Jan. 31, 1964, NSANL Papers, Box 334 f2; “Reporter W,” Feb. 22, 1964, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 21 f3.

30 Burros’s experiences during and after the trial are described in Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim, 165–75.

31 Wikipedia, “Roy Frankhouser,” last modified August 20, 2025, at 05:12 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Frankhouser#Clayton_trial.

32 Burros quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 262. The front-page story was titled “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin: Klan Leader Here, Hiding the Secret of His Jewish Origin, Preaches Anti-Semitism,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1965. For the most complete account of Burros’s life and exposure as a Jew, see Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim. For Epstein tipping off the New York Times, see Madole, “The Historical and Metaphysical Roots of the Conflict Between Jew and Gentile,” June–Sept. 1965, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f8.

33 Schmaltz, Hate, 263. For an excellent account of the events leading to Burros’s suicide, see New York Times, Nov. 1, 1965; Washington Post, Nov. 1, 1965; Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim.

34 For the Klan memorial, see Jerusalem Post, Nov. 4, 1965; Rockwell quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 264, 263; Madole quoted in NR Bulletin, June–Sept. 1965, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f8.

35 For Madole’s praise of Robert Burros, see “Robert Burros Organizes NRP Chapters in Upstate New York,” NR Bulletin, Jan.–Feb. 1965, Goring Papers, Box 1 f5; Lowell Sun (MA), Nov. 5, 1965. Burros’s story was reported in New York Post, Nov. 4, 1965. Ian Lehr, who participated in the White Castle riots, was also a bar-mitzvahed Jew.

36 Jerusalem Post, Nov. 4, 1965; Austin Stateman, Feb. 11, 1966. The fact that Rockwell was being represented by a Jew put him at the heart of yet another news cycle filled with publicity for the Nazi leader; see Austin Stateman, Feb. 11, 1966; Newsday, Feb. 10, 1966. For Collin’s Jewish background, see Milton Ellerin, “American Nazis: Myth or Menace?” Trends Analyses Division, Domestic Affairs Department, American Jewish Committee (New York, 1977), 5, https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/3855.

37 Wikipedia, “1965 Virginia gubernatorial election,” last modified November 10, 2025, at 00:47 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Virginia_gubernatorial_election; New Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), Nov. 6, 1965.

38 Quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 196.

39 Goring Report, Jan. 23, 1964, Goring Papers, Box 1 f7. For the number of Rockwell’s followers, see Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 36; Schmaltz, Hate, 278–79.

40 Rockwell quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 169; FBI Monograph, American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., June 1965), 33; Schmaltz, Hate, 200.

41 Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim, 100. Descriptions of storm troopers’ living conditions can be found in Schmaltz, Hate, 176–68; Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 37–39; Rosenthal and Gelb, One More Victim, 96–97.

42 Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 80; FBI, American Nazi Party, 36; Goring to Robert Burros, ca. May 1963, Goring Papers, Box 1 f6.

43 For descriptions of Rockwell’s narcissism and neglect of his men, see Schmaltz, Hate, and Simonelli, American Fuehrer.

44 Schmaltz, Hate, 268, 279; Washington Post, Feb. 19, 1966; New Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), Aug. 20, 1966.

45 FBI, American Nazi Party Monograph, 32.

46 Patler quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 317; his hot-and-cold relationship with Rockwell is further detailed in Simonelli, American Fuehrer, 134–37.

47 Patler quoted in Schmaltz, Hate, 320.

48 Rockwell’s death and its aftermath are described in numerous sources. Schmaltz, Hate, 322–34; Charles S. Clark, “An American Nazi’s Rise and Fall,” American History 40, no. 6 (Feb. 2006), 60–66; Newsday, Aug. 26, 1967; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Aug. 28, 30, and 31, 1967; Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt (scroll down for Rockwell’s death).

49 Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017) 159. For Rockwell’s death, see Schmaltz, Hate, 316–23; Newsday, Aug. 26, 1967.

50 For homosexuality within the far right, see Newton, National States Rights Party, 159; Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 518. For a discussion of government persecution of homosexuals during the Lavender Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, see Craig Loftin, Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

CHAPTER 15: JESSE STONER, WHITE POWER, AND THE NEW BETRAYED GENERATION

1 George Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 64 (1963), 137.

2 Milton Ellerin, “Rightist Extremism,” AJYB 69 (1968), 260, 269.

3 For the fragmentation of the American Nazi movement, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 14–15; John J. Rich Report, Feb. 2, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20.

4 Bernard Mintz Oral History, in Goldberger, et al. eds., “Not the Work of a Day,” vol. 4, 26–27. The House Un-American Activities Committee reported there were also fifty-six different women’s auxiliaries. Report by the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement (Washington, D.C.: US Govt. Printing Office, Dec. 1, 1967) 90th Congress, 18, 19. For a report on the growth and division among KKK units, see The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement. For Stoner welcoming Catholics who were usually excluded from the Klan, see “Anti-Jewish Agitation During 1959,” https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/3783

5 David Danzig, “Challenging Issues in a Changing South,” speech to Southwest Regional Conference of AJC, Houston, March 22, 1959, https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/4122 (see Z358.CV.pdf at link and scroll down for Danzig speech).

6 Between 1950 and 1960, the white population of the United States grew 17.5 percent while the non-white population expanded by 26.7 percent. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1961/dec/pc-s1-10.html. For changing demographics, see Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 73 (1972), 120. Demographic statistics are also drawn from https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/4122; and Philip Perlmutter, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 72 (1971), 145.

7 Stoner quoted in Thunderbolt 98 (Feb. 1968). The nation’s nearly six million Jews were concentrated in six states: New York, Florida, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. New York City remained the epicenter of Jewish life, housing 40 percent of all American Jews. Statistics are taken from Sidney Goldstein, “American Jewry, 1970: A Demographic Profile,” AJYB 72 (1971), 5; and Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 74 (1973), 154.

8 Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 171.

9 For more on Christian Identity teachings, see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Arie Perliger, American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Charles H. Roberts, Race Over Grace: The Racialist Religion of the Christian Identity Movement (New York: iUniverse, 2003); Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Barry J. Balleck, Modern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism: An Encyclopedia of Extremists and Extremist Groups (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2018); Anti-Defamation League, Danger: Extremism: The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far-Right Fringe (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1996); David Ostendorf, “Christian Identity: An American Heresy,” Journal of Hate Studies 1 (2001/2002), 23–56; Alon Milwicki, “Baptizing Nazism: An Analysis of the Religious Roots of American Neo-Nazism,” Journal of Hate Studies 12 (2014); Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun. For the early spread of Christian Identity in the United States, see Ralph Lord Roy, Apostles of Discord: A Study of Organized Bigotry and Disruption on the Fringes of Protestantism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 92–117.

10 FBI, NSRP Monograph Data (August 1966), 13, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n27/mode/2up

11 John George & Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 384.

12 Report by the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Dec. 1, 1967), 87; for Lynch’s battle scars, see SAC LA to Director: Rabble Rouser Index: Connie Lynch, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIRabbleRouserAgitatorIndexHQ1577782Sections14/page/n51/mode/2up.

13 The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement, 89; FBI, National States Rights Party Monograph Data (August 1966), 6, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n7/mode/2up.

14 Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 143. For Stoner always carrying a gun, see FBI, NSRP Monograph Data (August 1966), ii, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n5/mode/2up.

15 California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, Para-Military Organizations in California (California Department of Justice: Sacramento, 1965), Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Paramilitary_Orgs_in_California_1965_84p/page/n43/mode/2up?view=theater; FBI, NSRP Monograph Data (August 1966), iii, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n7/mode/2up.

16 Milton Ellerin, “Rightist Extremism,” AJYB 66 (1965), 205; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries; Gary Donaldson, Liberalism’s Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1964 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1963). For an excellent biography of Wallace, see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

17 New York Times, May 31, 1964; FBI, NSRP Monograph Data (August 1966), 3, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n17/mode/2up.

18 Report by the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Dec. 1, 1967); FBI, National States Rights Party Monograph Data (August 1966), Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/FBIMonographNationalStatesRightsParty1966Edition/page/n25/mode/2up; Milton Ellerin, “Rightist Extremism,” AJYB 66 (1965), 200.

19 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 68 (1967), 83, 84.

20 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Aug. 31, 1965.

21 Edward Rogowsky, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 69 (1968), 234, 237–38.

22 Rogowsky, 242.

23 Rogowsky, 242; King quoted in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Civil Rights and Intergroup Tensions,” AJYB 66 (1965), 188.

24 Figures taken from Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), 223.

25 NY FBI Office, “Report: Right Wing Convention, Washington, D.C., April 20–21, 1968,” Lazar Collection, May 3, 1968, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-HQ-14/page/n123/mode/2up.

26 [First Assembly of Racist Movements], “For Immediate Release,” April 22, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f11.

27 FBI NY Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Report, March 18, 1969: James Harting Madole, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/page/n109/mode/2up; https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-HQ-14/page/n97/mode/2up.

28 “Finding on MLK Assassination,” scroll down to (d) William Hugh Morris, 382. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/part-2c.html#top

29 Newton, National States Rights Party, 168.

30 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 181; Newton, National States Rights Party, 168; Atlanta Constitution, March 22, 1969; Chicago Defender, April 8, 1969.

31 Ray quoted in Jeff Cohen and David S. Lifton, “A Man He Calls Raoul,” New Times, April 1, 1977, 31.

32 The five states were Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. For vote totals, see “1968 United States presidential election,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election.

33 NSRP Platform, quoted in Webb, Rabble Rousers, 182; also see, FBI, White Extremist Organizations: Part II National States Rights Party (Washington, D.C. May 1970), 8.

34 Atlanta Constitution, June 2, 1970; Wall Street Journal, Sept. 1, 1970.

35 Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 1970.

36 Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 1970. For Stoner’s promise of distribution of Jewish wealth, see Chicago Defender, June 22, 1970.

37 California Bureau of Criminal Identification, Para-Military Organizations, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Paramilitary_Orgs_in_California_1965_84p/page/n53/mode/2up?view=theater; Newton, National States Rights Party, 102.

38 FBI LA SAC Report, Harry L. Griffin, July 24, 1963, Re: William Potter Gale, https://archive.org/details/GaleWilliamP.HQ1/page/n61/mode/2up; California Bureau of Criminal Identification, Para-Military Organizations, https://archive.org/details/foia_Paramilitary_Orgs_in_California_1965_84p/page/n53/mode/2up?view=theater, both in Lazar Collection.

39 California Bureau of Criminal Identification, Para-Military Organizations, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Paramilitary_Orgs_in_California_1965_84p/page/n67/mode/2up?view=theater.

40 “Minutemen, 1963–969: Evolution of the Militia Movement in America, Part I,” https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/archives-unbound/primary-sources_archives-unbound_minutemen-1963-1969_evolution-of-the-militia-movement-in-america-part-i.pdf; Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Paramilitary_Orgs_in_California_1965_84p/page/n63/mode/2up?view=theater.

41 Butler quoted in Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 233–34; see the Epilogue for a further discussion of these groups.

42 For an excellent account of returning Vietnam and Gulf War veterans and their disillusionment with American politics, see Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

43 Earl Raab, “Intergroup Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 71 (1970), 192.

44 “The Troubled American: A Special Report on the White Majority,” Newsweek, Oct. 6, 1969, 28.

45 Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” New York, April 14, 1969, 29; Carey quoted in Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” 28. For broad perspectives on white middle-class and working-class alienation, see Kevin Phillips, Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity (New York: Harper Collins, 1994); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010).

46 “The Troubled American: A Special Report on the White Majority,” Newsweek, Oct. 6, 1969, 28. For growing discontent among veterans returning from Vietnam and later the Afghanistan and the Gulf Wars, see Belew, Bring the War Home.

47 William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1999), 286.

48 First to quotes in Schmaltz, Hate, 289–90; for Rockwell’s turn to White Power and his Chicago rallies, see New York Times, Aug. 30, Sept. 8, 11, 15, 1966; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Aug. 31, 1966; Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 102–04, 125.

49 Newsweek quoted in Earl Raab, “Intergroup Tensions in the US,” AJYB 71 (1970), 200.

50 Poll cited in Webb, Rabble Rousers, 205.

51 Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 74 (1973), 139–40.

52 Primary results can be found at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/wallace-president/.

53 Wallace’s quote cited in Michigan Advance, May 16, 2022.

54 Webb, Rabble Rousers, 184–85; Philip Perlmutter, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 74 (1973), 144. For the growing power of Christian Evangelicals during the Nixon and Reagan administrations, see David E. Settje, Evil Deeds in High Places: Christian America’s Moral Struggle with Watergate (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Diane Winston, Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023); Lerone A. Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023). For the rising influence of Christian nationalism, see Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover; Bradley Onishi, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023).

55 For a video copy of Stoner’s campaign ad, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SokWrDWpyA&rco=1.

56 Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 3, 1972.

57 Newsday, Aug. 6, 1972; also see, Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1972.

58 Atlanta Daily World, Aug. 17, 1972.

59 Hartford Courant, Jan. 10, 1972.

60 Newton, National States Rights Party, 179; Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 170.

61 Washington Post, Oct. 18, 1969.

CHAPTER 16: THE END OF SPYING

1 Sheldon’s operatives reported that Madole held 166 meetings between February 11, 1965, and November 19, 1967. “Confidential: U.S. Department of Justice: James Harting Madole,” Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

2 Author telephone interviews with Barnet Kellman, Oct. 26, 2022, and March 26, 2024, Los Angeles.

3 Interview with Barnet Kellman, March 26, 2024.

4 Ibid.

5 James L. Collings Report, Aug. 4, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f8.

6 Rockwell’s name was added a week earlier, while Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesse Stoner were added to the Rabble Rouser list three months later. NY Special Agent in Charge to Director, Aug. 18, 1967, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.tx.

7 John J. Rich Report, Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20.

8 NRP Flyer, “Mass Rally for the Restoration of ‘White Power’ in the US!” Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5.

9 Rich Report, Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20.

10 William Goring Report, Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5; Rich Report, Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20.

11 Louis Mostaccio was also present but did not file a report. Rich Report, Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; Goring Report, Dec. 8, 1967, NSANL Papers, Box 338 f5.

12 FBI Director to Special Agents in Charge (SAC) in Twenty-Six Cities, “Liaison with ADL of B’nai B’rith,” Jan. 17, 1968, and SAC Indianapolis to Director, Jan. 25, 1968, www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000%20---%20100-IP-16164%20---%20Section%201.PDF. The Indianapolis office wrote Hoover that it had worked with the ADL “for [the] past ten years” and maintained a very cooperative relationship. For a more in-depth look at Hoover and the FBI during these years, see Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (New York: Viking, 2022); Lerone A. Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

13 Author interview with Barnet Kellman, Oct. 26, 2022, Los Angeles. In September 1964, after the horrific slaying in June of the three civil rights workers, Hoover bowed to pressure from President Lyndon Johnson and inaugurated a “counterintelligence program” to investigate white hate groups. For the FBI’s relation to White Supremacists and Christian nationalists after Hoover’s death, see Martin, Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, 259–71. For examples of subsequent cooperation between the FBI and ADL offices around the country, see SAC Dallas to Director, July 18, 1968, www.israellobby.org/ADL/NARA/62-4098.pdf; SA Robert R. Hanni to SAC, Minneapolis, www.israellobby.org/ADL/NARA/62-4098.pdf; SAC New Haven to Director, Sept. 26, 1968; SAC Boston to Director, Oct. 14, 1968, www.israellobby.org/ADL/1199215-000%20---%20100-IP-16164%20---%20Section%201.PDF. For reforms initiated by the Senate’s Church Committee, see Gage, G-Man, 728–29.

14 The groups attending included the Consumers and Taxpayers, Brooklyn; NRP, New York City; ANP, Los Angeles; ANP, Dallas; ANP, Davenport, Iowa; White Party of America; National Socialist White Peoples Party; American Resistance Movement, Middletown, DE; American Committee for Public Enlightenment, Brooklyn; United Front Against Communism, Reading, PA; Anti-Communist Advisory Board, Alexandria, VA; Sons of Liberty, Hollywood; Teutonic Knights, Alexandria; and Minutemen. Endorsing organizations included the White Circle League of America, Chicago; Truth Seeker, San Diego; Western Unity Movement, Quebec; White Man’s Mission, Toronto; I Love America Series, Salt Lake City. “The First Assembly of Racist Movements,” Rich Report, April 22, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 246 f1. For the FBI relying on Rudden, see FBI Director to SAC NY, April 18, 1968, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_NRP-HQ-14/page/n107/mode/2up.

15 [First Assembly of Racist Movements], “For Immediate Release,” April 22, 1968,” NSANL Papers, Box 246 f11.

16 Edward Rogowsky, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 69 (1968), 233. The 40 percent figure is taken from AJYB 70 (1969), v.

17 NRP Flyer, “Are You Rugged Enough?” NSANL Papers, Box 246 f11.

18 William Goring, “The National Renaissance Party: History and Analysis of an American Neo-Nazi Political Party,” National Information Center Newsletter (Springfield, MA), 1970, 16.

19 Goring, “The National Renaissance Party,” 16.

20 New York Times, Feb. 13, 1968; Rich Report, Feb 2, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; Madole interview with FBI March 1, 1968, in FBI NY SAC Report, March 18,1969, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/page/n99/mode/2up.

21 Rich Report, Feb. 2, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; FBI report, Sept. 15, 1968, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt; quote from Rich Report, Feb. 2, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 336 f20; also see flyer advertising NRP Rally for Wallace, Feb. 2, 1968, at PS 169,113 E. 87th Street, NSANL Papers, Box 339 f7.

22 Larry Sestito Report, July 28, 1969, NSANL Papers, Box 271 f5.

23 Newsday, April 21, 1969.

24 FBI Report, Sept. 22, 1968, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt; FBI Supplemental Correlation Summary, Feb. 23, 1971, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/page/n125/mode/2up; Gordon Hall. Interview with James Madole, Aug. 30, 1967, https://library.illinoisstate.edu/downloads/assets/digital-collections/voices-of-extremism/ve015a.pdf; Newsday, April 21, 1969. Butch Goring placed the national membership closer to 1,300. Goring, “National Renaissance Party,”13. By 1973, James Collings estimated 3,000 people belonged to the NRP, with strongholds in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Collings Report, July 25, 1973, NSANL Papers, Box 345 f8.

25 For examples of local responses, see Rich Report, March 23, 1968, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f3; Emanuel Goldstein Report, Feb. 7, 1969, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f4; FBI Report, Feb. 12, 1969, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt; Jerusalem Post, June 22, 1970.

26 Steven E. Frieder, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in New York City,” AJYB 71 (1970), 224–25; Edward Rogowsky, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 70 (1969), 75.

27 Rogowsky, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” 82. For growing Black–Jewish cleavages in the 1960s and ’70s, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018).

28 Emanuel Goldstein Report, Feb. 7, 1969, NSANL Papers, Box 340 f4.

29 New York Times, Aug. 10, 1969. NRP members passed out 2,000 flyers in one leafleting effort on March 7, 1970, and 5,000 three months later. Madole and eight troopers also flooded New York’s Port Authority bus terminal with 2,000 flyers that November. FBI Reports, March 7, June 2, Nov. 15, 1970, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

30 New York Times, June 24, 1969. For more on the JDL, see Miriam Eve Mora, “‘Husky Jewish Boys’: The Jewish Defense League and the Project of American Jewish Masculinity,” Journal of Jewish Identities 15, no. 2 (2022), 135–51; Jacob Dorman, “Dreams Defended and Deferred: The Brooklyn Schools Crisis of 1968 and Black Power’s Influence on Rabbi Meir Kahane,” American Jewish History 100, no. 3 (July 2016), 411–37; Judith Tydor Baumel, “Kahane in America: An Exercise in Right-Wing Urban Terror,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1999), 311–29.

31 Martin Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part I,” posted Nov. 18, 2012, https://renaissance88.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/the-national-renaissance-party-part-i/. Parts I and II originally appeared in Heritage and Destiny, 13 (Fall 2003) and 14 (Winter 2004). Kerr was chief of staff of the ultranationalist New Order.

32 Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part I.” For the growth of the JDL, see Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 73 (1972), 115; New York Times, Jan. 18 and 25, 1971; Records of the Identification Division, New York Police Department, July 1, 1971, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

33 William Goring, No. 8717 National Renaissance Party Material 1961–1971, 212, Goring Papers, Box 1 f7.

34 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 85; New York Times, April 2, 1966; Newsday, Dec. 12, 1977; Martin Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part I.”

35 “The American Jews Today,” Newsweek, March 1, 1971.

36 Madole describes this encounter in “Attempt Made on the Life of NRP Leader Madole,” National Renaissance Bulletin 22, nos. 3 and 4 (March and April 1971).

37 James Madole, “Assassination Attempts (Plural) by Jews Against James Madole,” National Vanguard, posted June 20, 2021, https://nationalvanguard.org/2021/06/assassination-attempts-plural-by-jews-against-james-madole/.

38 The quote and description of the attack is taken from “Attempt Made on the Life,” NR Bulletin 22, nos. 3 and 4 (March and April 1971). For the FBI’s report on the attack, see SAC New York to Secret Service, Aug. 24, 1971, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/page/n145/mode/2up.

39 James Madole, “Assassination Attempts (Plural) by Jews Against James Madole.”

40 Martin Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part I”; SAC NY to Director, May 28, 1971, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/page/n137/mode/2up; Vincent J. Ascherl to NY SAC, Sept. 2, 1971, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Madole_James-HQ-3/Madole_James-HQ-3_djvu.txt.

41 “Reporter B,” April 17, 1957, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f2; Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 458, 466n39–41; Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Cross-Currents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956), 359; Kellman, “Anti-Jewish Agitation,” AJYB 57 (1956), 184. For examples of agent reports, see Report on Meeting of Patriots for McCarthy, Oct. 15, 1954, NSANL Papers, Box 298 f26; James Sheldon to Dr. Fayez Sayegh, March 21, 1956, NSANL Papers, Box 310 f8; “Reporter B” to Shoenfeld, April 17, May 13, 1957, Shoenfeld Papers, Box 15 f2; May 3 and June 2, 1958, Box 15 f5. Reporter B was most likely Mario Buzzi.

42 James H. Madole, “‘The New Atlantis’: A Blueprint for an Aryan ‘Garden of Eden’ in North America!” (Part VIII), NR Bulletin 26, nos. 7 and 8 (July and August 1975), 5.

43 Madole’s “The New Atlantis” series ran from 1973 to 1976. For the easiest way to access its various parts, see James Madole, “The New Atlantis,” https://thenewatlantis88.wordpress.com; Kerry Bolton, Phoenix Rising: The Epic Saga of James H. Madole (Paraparaumu Beach, NZ: Renaissance Press, 2001), https://www.scribd.com/document/582406238/James-Hartung-Madole-Phoenix-Rising-by-Kerry-Raymond-Bolton. For a more complete analysis of Madole’s occult theories, see Coogan, Dreamer of the Day; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2002); Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017); Jeffrey Kaplan, “The Post-War Paths of Occult National Socialism: From Rockwell and Madole to Manson,” Patterns of Prejudice 35, no. 3 (2001), 41–67; Martin Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part II,” Heritage and Destiny, ca.2004, https://renaissance88.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/the-nrp-two-part-article-from-heritage-destiny-magazine/; Martin Kerr, “History of American National Socialism: Part 5: The Pre-Rockwell Years (1946–1958),” Stormfront, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/blogs/u224711-e4914/; Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

44 Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part II,” https://renaissance88.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/the-nrp-two-part-article-from-heritage-destiny-magazine/.

45 NY Special Agent in Charge to FBI, June 26, 1974, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/NRP-FBI/NRP-HQ-16/page/n215/mode/2up.

46 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Feb. 26, 1974; also see biographical notes in James H. Sheldon Papers, 1945, https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/archives/cul-6913793.

47 New York Times, April 19, 1975.

48 At a fund-raiser in 2018, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt told me his group was still running undercover operations. When I asked to see the reports, he declined, saying they were using the same techniques as in the past and did not want them known. For ADL spying in the 1990s, see Jeffrey Blankfort, “ADL Spies on Americans,” CounterPunch, June 12, 2016. For the Church Committee, see Gage, G-Man, 728–29; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee.

49 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 85; Martin Kerr, “The National Renaissance Party: Part II,” Heritage and Destiny, ca. 2004, https://renaissance88.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/the-nrp-two-part-article-from-heritage-destiny-magazine. For Lisanik’s background, see FBI SAC Newark, Lazar Collection, Feb. 29, 1972, https://archive.org/details/NRP-FBI/NRP-NYC-25/page/n229/mode/2up.

50 The DeGuello Report is quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 184.

51 Nathan Perlmutter Oral Memoir in Epstein, Perlmutter, eds., “Not the Work of a Day”: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Oral Memoirs, eds. Oscar Cohen and Stanley Wexler, vol. 1 (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1987), 344–45. Benjamin Epstein’s increasing concern for supporting Israel per author’s telephone interview with David Epstein, May 17, 2024.

52 Milton Ellerin, “American Nazis: Myth or Menace?” Trends Analyses Division, Domestic Affairs Department, American Jewish Committee (New York, 1977), 11, https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/3855; News From the Committee, Oct. 30, 1977, https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/5872.

53 Ellerin, “American Nazis—Myth or Menace?” 5, 8.

CHAPTER 17: THE LAST GODFATHER OF WHITE SUPREMACY

1 Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations and Tensions in the United States,” AJYB 82 (1982), 103.

2 Quoted in Milton Ellerin, “Politics and Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 76 (1976), 118; for rising antisemitism and racism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, see Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 81 (1981), 121 and “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 83 (1983), 67–68. ADL leaders also warned of a resurgence of antisemitism in the early 1970s in Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 20, 1972.

3 Atlanta Constitution, April 9, 1974.

4 Quoted in Michael Newton, The National States Rights Party: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 183. Christ Not a Jew and Jews Not God’s Chosen People was published by the Thunderbolt press.

5 David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 3rd edition), 401. For more on the bombings, see Washington Post, Sept. 28, 1977; Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 181; Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 207.

6 Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses, 181.

7 New York Times, Sept. 29, 1977; also see Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 27, 1977.

8 Atlanta Daily World, June 14, 1979.

9 Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 27, 1979; Atlanta Daily World, Jan. 13 and 14, 1983.

10 Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 12 and May 15, 1980.

11 Atlanta Daily World, June 5, 1983.

12 Atlanta Daily World, Feb. 3, 1983; Newton, National States Rights Party, 190. For a more complete look at the FBI manhunt for Stoner, see Stoner, J. B.: Birmingham Church Bombing: HQ 88-86081, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.BirminghamChurchBombingHQ8886081145152pp/page/n3/mode/2up. The Atlanta Daily World provided readers with regular updates on the FBI’s manhunt.

13 FBI Special Agent in Charge, Birmingham to Director, Feb. 2, 1983, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.BirminghamChurchBombingHQ8886081145152pp/page/n23/mode/2up; Dallas SAC to Director, April 19, 1983, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.BirminghamChurchBombingHQ8886081145152pp/page/n49/mode/2up; also see FBI Legal Attaché Mexico City to Director, April 19, 1983, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.BirminghamChurchBombingHQ8886081145152pp/page/n65/mode/2up.

14 FBI SAC Mobile to Director, June 3, 1983, Lazar Collection, https://archive.org/details/STONERJ.B.BirminghamChurchBombingHQ8886081145152pp/page/n143/mode/2up; Atlanta Constitution, June 3, 1983.

15 Atlanta Daily World, June 7, 1983; Jerry Ray, States’ Rights Voter League, Quarterly Report (Summer 1984), 3, quoted in John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 388.

16 Stoner quoted in Webb, Rabble Rousers, 208; Crusade Against Corruption newsletter, July 1993, quoted in ADL, Danger: Extremism: The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far-Right Fringe (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1996), 149.

17 George and Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, 387; NSRP executive committee quote in Newton, National States Rights Party, 192.

18 George and Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, 387.

19 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 149.

20 “Highlights: Guide for Volunteer Christian Posses: The Posse Comitatus,” Guide for Volunteer Christian Posses 6, no. 2 (Ministry of Christ Church), https://swift.christogenea.org/articles/vol-6-no-2-highlights-guide-volunteer-christian-posses-posse-comitatus; quote can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_(organization), note 8. For a brief overview of the Posse Comitatus, see Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 289–92. For William Gale’s views and writings, see William Gale, Colonel William Potter Gale, 1917–1988: Selected Essays, vol. 1 (Patriot Press, 2013).

21 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 275–76; also see Martin Durham, White Rage: The Extreme Right in American Politics (London & NY: Routledge, 2007), 51–53.

22 Durham, White Rage, 69.

23 Quotes from Aryan Nations’ “Declaration of Independence” in ADL, Danger: Extremism, 188–89, 17.

24 Butler’s movement influenced other far-right leaders such as White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, former Texas Klan Grand Dragon Louis Beam, National Alliance head William Pierce, and myriad spin-off groups such as the Aryan Republic Army and the New Order. For more on Butler and Aryan Nations, see Federal Bureau of Investigation, Aryan Nations, Part 1 (n.p., n.d.) https://vault.fbi.gov/Aryan%20Nation/Aryan%20Nation%20Part%2001/view; FBI, Aryan Nation, Part 2 (n.p., n.d.) https://vault.fbi.gov/Aryan%20Nation/Aryan%20Nation%20Part%2002%20%28Final%29/view; Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2002); Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 22–5, 56–58; Richard Butler Profile, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/richard-butler/; Barkin, Religion and the Racist Right, 63–68; Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, White Power, White Pride, 76–82; Durham, White Rage; Spencer Sunshine, et al., Up in Arms: A Guide to Oregon’s Patriot Movement (Rural Organizing Project, 2016), https://rop.org/uia/section-i/the-patriot-movement-historically-nationally/patriot-movement-past-present/. For the best overview of subsequent militias, see ADL, Danger: Extremism; and ADL, “The Militia Movement (2020),” https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/militia-movement-2020.

25 James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 2nd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995), 133.

26 Stoner quoted in New York Times, Jan. 18, 1987. For his cross-burning and election results, see Newton, National States Rights Party, 196, 198; Atlanta Daily World, June 5, 1990.

27 https://genius.com/Ice-cube-my-skin-is-my-sin-lyrics.

28 Emory Burke, The Unlifted Curse (Eclectic, AL: American Nationalist Publications, 1992).

29 Stoner quoted in Newton, National States Rights Party, 203; Washington Post, April 28, 2005.

30 For a sample of obituaries, see Washington Post, April 28, 2005; New York Times, April 28, 2005; Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2005; Boston Globe, April 28, 2005.

31 See “The Year in Hate,” SPLC Intelligence Review 157 (Spring 2105), 45–48, and subsequent volumes; also cited in Newton, National States Rights Party, 206.

EPILOGUE: WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE

1 For brevity’s sake, I place the numerous extremist groups of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century under the umbrella of militia and patriotic movements. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists nearly two dozen categories of antigovernment and hate groups, with dozens of organizations belonging to each. For specific groups and individuals see https://www.splcenter.org. The easiest access to the long list of SPLC hate groups can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_designated_by_the_Southern_Poverty_Law_Center_as_hate_groups. For a slightly different timeline for far-right radicalization, see National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, “January 6th Defendants with Connections to Extremist Groups/Movements,” https://www.start.umd.edu/january-6th-capitol-extremists-network.

2 Earl Raab, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 88 (1988), 143; Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 163. In addition to working with Burke, Stoner, and Rockwell, Butler allied himself with Wesley Swift and Gerald L. K. Smith. For Butler and the subsequent evolution of the militia movement and its uses of Christian Identity, see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 63–68; Charles H. Roberts, Race Over Grace: The Racialist Religion of the Christian Identity Movement (New York: iUniverse, 2003); Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile, White Power, White Pride: The White Separatist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 76–82. For histories of Butler and the Aryan Nations, see Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Violent Anti-Government Militia Movement (New York: Signet Books, 1990); Sam Jackson, Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Arie Perliger, American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Alon Milwicki, “Baptizing Nazism: An Analysis of the Religious Roots of American Neo-Nazism,” Journal of Hate Studies 12 (2014), 173; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity; ADL, Danger: Extremism: The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far-Right Fringe (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1996), 17; Durham, White Rage, 67–68; Newton, National States Rights Party, 172–92; ADL, “Richard Butler,” https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/richard-butler/; Aryan Nations Leader Richard Girnt Butler in Final Days of Life, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/aryan-nations-leader-richard-girnt-butler-final-days-life/.

3 Earl Raab, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 88 (1988), 143. For the uses of Christian Identity by white nationalists, see Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017); Roberts, Race Over Grace.

4 Barry J. Balleck, Modern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism: An Encyclopedia of Extremists and Extremist Groups (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2018), 23. For FBI reports on activities of the Aryan Nations during the 1980s, see Federal Bureau of Investigation, Aryan Nations, Part 1 (n.p., n.d.) https://vault.fbi.gov/Aryan%20Nation/Aryan%20Nation%20Part%2001/view; FBI, Aryan Nation, Part 2 (n.p., n.d.) https://vault.fbi.gov/Aryan%20Nation/Aryan%20Nation%20Part%2002%20%28Final%29/view.

5 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 190.

6 Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 80 (1980), 71. For the establishment of the Aryan Nations’ Liberty Net, see ADL, Danger: Extremism, 6.

7 Earl Raab and Douglas Kahn, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 90 (1990), 214; Belew, Bring the War Home, 113.

8 Southern Poverty Law Center, “Aryan Nations,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/aryan-nations; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 22, 30, 56; Durham, White Rage, 70. For membership statistics, see Earl Raab, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 88 (1988), 143, 146.

9 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 189; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 364–65.

10 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 19–20; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Aryan Nations,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/aryan-nations; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 22, 30, 56; Durham White Rage, 70.

11 For a transcript of Reagan’s speech, see https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-news-conference-23; Reagan quoted in Belew, Bring the War Home, 106.

12 For a look at far-right conservative politics in the Reagan and post-Reagan eras, see Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021); Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (New York: Basic Books, 2022).

13 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 110; William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1999), 283. For Pierce and the rise of the National Alliance, see George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far Right (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008); Martin Durham, “From Imperium to Internet: The National Alliance and the American Extreme Right,” Patterns of Prejudice 36 (2002), 50–61. For an interview with Pierce conducted in December 1999, see Carol M. Swain and Russ Nieli, eds., Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 260–75.

14 Koehl’s mother’s maiden name was Birstein. Schmaltz, Hate, 227. For his homosexuality, also see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999), 518.

15 ADL, Explosion of Hate, 46; see interview with Pierce in Swain and Nieli, Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism, 265. For a recent history of the John Birch Society, see Matthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (New York: Basic Books, 2023).

16 Swain and Nieli, Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism, 263; ADL, Danger: Extremism, 109–110.

17 ADL, Explosion of Hate, 6.

18 ADL, Explosion of Hate, 6; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 285–87.

19 ADL, Explosion of Hate, 15, 25–27.

20 ADL, Explosion of Hate, 15–16; SPLC quoted in Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 237. For a closer look at the National Alliance, see ADL, Explosion of Hate, 30–31.

21 ADL, Modern American Extremism, xxiii. Also see the brief description of the novel at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries.

22 For more on The Turner Diaries, see Andrew Macdonald (William Luther Pierce), The Turner Diaries (National Vanguard Books, 1978); Balleck, Modern American Extremism, xxiii; ADL, Explosion of Hate, 1–15; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries#cite_note-ADL-TD-5; Camille Jackson, “The Turner Diaries, Other Racist Novels, Inspire Extremist Violence,” Oct. 14, 2004, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/turner-diaries-other-racist-novels-inspire-extremist-violence/.

23 Belew, Bring the War Home, 110; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries#cite_note-sutherland-14. For the Order, see Flynn and Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood; ADL, Danger: Extremism, 223; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 269–72; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jay_Mathews; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_group).

24 Belew, Bring the War Home, 116–17; ADL, Danger: Extremism, 223.

25 Flynn and Gerhardt, Silent Brotherhood, 20.

26 Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 269–72.

27 Earl Raab, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 88 (1988), 143; Raab, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 89 (1989), 170; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_group). In August 2024, a film based on their exploits, The Order, debuted at the Venice Film Festival. It later screened on Amazon Prime. “Operation Clean Sweep” is discussed in Balleck, American Extremism, 189, 207–10.

28 Murray Friedman, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 87 (1987), 134; Belew, Bring the War Home, 134.

29 Belew, Bring the War Home, 4.

30 For FBI success in infiltrating a range of militia movements during the 1980s, see Belew, Bring the War Home, 124–27; Gage, G-Man, 722–32.

31 Louis Beam, “Leaderless Resistance,” Seditionist 12 (Feb. 1992), http://www.louisbeam.com/leaderless.htm.

32 ADL, Danger Extremism, 7; Louis Beam, “Leaderless Resistance.” For Beam’s background and Leaderless Resistance, see Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 31–32; Durham, “From Imperium to Internet,” 58–59; Belew, Bring the War Home, 34–35; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Beam.

33 Beam, “Leaderless Resistance.”

34 Beam, “Leaderless Resistance”; Beam quoted in Belew, Bring the War Home, 35. For Beam’s writings, see Louis R. Beam, ed., Essays by a Klansman (Hayden Lake, ID: A.K.I.A. Publications, 1983).

35 For excellent accounts of Ruby Ridge and Waco, see Belew, Bring the War Home, 187–92; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge_standoff; U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism Technology and Government, Ruby Ridge: Report of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government, Information of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).

36 In addition to sources in note 36, see Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 220; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege.

37 The bombing and its subsequent impact are discussed in numerous works, among them Belew, Bring the War Home, 209–34; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, xvii; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing.

38 Macdonald, The Turner Diaries.

39 Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist (New York: Regan Books, 2001), 225; Belew, Bring the War Home, 210. The FBI reported that 37 percent of lone-offender terrorists in the United States between 1972 and 2015 had served in the military. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Lone Offender: A Study of Lone Offender Terrorism in the United States (1972– 2015) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, November 2019), 17.

40 ADL, Danger: Extremism, 110.

41 ADL, Danger: Extremism, vi. The Center for Democratic Renewal placed the number of hard-core activists at 25,000 with an additional 150,000 to 175,000 sympathizers. Belew, Bring the War Home, 3, 5, 195–96, 206. For other statistics, see Jerome A. Chanes, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 92 (1992), 184; and Chanes, “Intergroup Relations,” AJYB 95 (1995), 104–05.

42 ADL, Danger: Extremism, vi–ii; Belew, Bring the War Home, 232; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 220–21.

43 Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 220–21, 281, xxiv.

44 Wray quoted in Perliger, American Zealots, 5. The major categories included Ku Klux Klans, Neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, Racist Skinheads, Extreme Antigovernment Movements, Militia Movements, Sovereign Citizens Movements, Conspiracy Propagandists, “Constitutional Sheriff” Movements, Neo-Confederate, Christian Identity, Anti-LGBTQ, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Semitic, Neo-Völkisch, Anti-Muslim, Male Supremacy, Radical Traditional Catholic, Black Separatists, Black Nationalists, and Other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_designated_by_the_Southern_Poverty_Law_Center_as_hate_groups.

45 Three Percenters website, threepercentersclub.org. American Colonial historians suggest that one-third of the colonists fought against the Crown, one-third supported the Crown, and one-third remained neutral. For more on the Three Percenters, see Malcolm Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militia, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022), 104–07; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 363; Spencer Sunshine, “Profile on the Right: Three Percenters,” Political Research Associates, Jan. 5, 2016, https://politicalresearch.org/2016/01/05/profiles-on-the-right-three-percenters; Mike Giglio, “A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans,” Atlantic, Sept. 30, 2020; ADL, “Three Percenters,” https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/three-percenters; https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/three-percenters; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters.

46 Oath Keeper pledge cited in Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 221.

47 For an in-depth discussion of the Oath Keepers, see Jackson, Oath Keepers; Nance, They Want to Kill Americans, 102–04; Andrew Lokay, Kaitlyn Robinson, and Martha Crenshaw, “The Oath Keepers,” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 14 (2021), 160–78; “ADL on Oath Keepers,” https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/oath-keepers.

48 Membership statistics are taken from Jackson, Oath Keepers, 7–8; Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 259. The ADL placed membership closer to 2,000. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Keepers. For their alliance with the Tea Party, see Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard, 217–18.

49 For studies of the Proud Boys, see Andy Campbell, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism (New York: Hachette Books, 2022); Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (New York: Beacon Press, 2020); Nance, They Want to Kill Americans, 76–81; Margo Kitt, “Proud Boys, Nationalism, and Religion,” Journal of Religion and Violence (2021), 12–32.

50 New York Times, Sept. 28, 2003.

51 Campbell, We Are Proud Boys, 5.

52 Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard, 219. For veterans joining militias and antigovernment groups in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, see Dr. Seth G. Jones, Statement before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, “Violent Domestic Extremist Groups and the Recruitment of Veterans,” Oct. 13, 2021, Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/113968/witnesses/HHRG-117-VR00-Wstate-JonesS-20211013.pdf.

53 For a general look at the rise of the radical right before and during the first Trump administration, see David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Donald Trump (New York: Verso, 2017); David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy (New York: Melville House, 2023); Nance, They Want to Kill Americans.

54 Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 6; also see Campbell, We Are Proud Boys, 6.

55 For reports of the rally and its aftermath, see Joe Heim, “Recounting a Day of Rage, Hate, Violence and Death,” Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2017; Bill Morlin, “Extremists’ ‘Unite the Right’ Rally: A Possible Historic Alt-Right Showcase?” Oct. 7, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/extremists-unite-right-rally-possible-historic-alt-right-showcase/; Bill Morin, “‘Summer of Hate’ challenged in companion civil lawsuits,” Oct. 19, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/summer-hate-challenged-companion-civil-lawsuits/; Michael Edison Hayden, Hannah Gais, Cassie Miller, Megan Squire, Jason Wilson, “‘Unite the Right’ 5 Years Later: Where Are They Now?,” Aug. 11, 2022, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/unite-right-5-years-later-where-are-they-now/

56 Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11, 2018.

57 Washington Post, Aug. 13, 2017. Statistics are taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_designated_by_the_Southern_Poverty_Law_Center_as_hate_groups.

58 Membership numbers can be found at Oath Keepers, https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/oath-keepers.

59 New York Times, Jan. 9, 2021.

60 The January 6th Report: The Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (New York: Celadon Books, 2022), xxiii; New York Times, Jan. 6, 2021. For the use of social media by the far right, see Catie Snow Bailard, et al., “‘Keep Your Head Held High Boys!’: Examining the Relationship between the Proud Boys’ Online Discourse and Offline Activities,” American Political Science Review 118, no. 4 (2024), 1–18; Hieu Nguyen and Swapna S. Gokhale, “Analyzing Extremist Social Media Content: A Case Study of Proud Boys,” Social Network Analysis and Mining 12 (2022), 1–14; Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2024.

61 Nance, They Want to Kill Americans,14. For ongoing communication between the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers prior to January 6, 2021, see New York Times, Feb. 11 and March 24, 2021. For coverage of the Capitol riots, see daily columns in the New York Times and Washington Post. For the Proud Boys’ and Oath Keepers’ role on January 6, see Daniel Rothbart and David M. Stebbins, “The Proud Boys Raging Righteously at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021: A Hate Group in Action,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 29 (2023), 426–6; Hampton Stall and Aaron Wolfson, “Actor Profile: Oath Keepers,” Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, www.jstor.org/stable/resrep33276; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys#cite_ref-206.

62 For the far-right buildup to the Capitol Riots and the riots themselves, see Bradley Onishi, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023); Nance, They Want to Kill Americans.

63 For the grand jury indictment, see “Trump charged with 4 felony counts for attempt to overturn the 2020 election,” NPR, August 1, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/08/01/1190459957/trump-indictment-jan-6-2020-election.”

64 The January 6th Report, xi.

65 Milton Ellerin, “American Nazis: Myth or Menace?” Trends Analyses Division, Domestic Affairs Department, American Jewish Committee (New York, 1977), https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/4841.

66 Ellerin, “American Nazis,” https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/3855.

67 Balleck, Modern American Extremism, 219.

68 “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Warns of Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Gazpacho Police,’” NBC News, Feb. 9, 2022; “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Said ‘Jewish Space Lasers’ Caused California Wildfires?” Snopes, March 6, 2024; “‘I’m a black NAZI!’: NC GOP Nominee for Governor Made Dozens of Disturbing Comments on Porn Forum,” Sept. 19, 2024, CNN Politics, https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/kfile-mark-robinson-black-nazi-pro-slavery-porn-forum/index.html; also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Boebert. For the rise of the Republican’s far-right Tea Party wing, see Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard; Nance, They Want to Kill Americans.

69 New York Times, Jan. 22, 2025. For Trump’s pardons of the convicted Capitol rioters, see New York Times and Washington Post, Jan. 20–25, 2025.

70 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 148; Thomas Jefferson to L. W. Tazewell, 1805, https://www.monticello.org/the-art-of-citizenship/the-role-of-education/. Jefferson’s book was first published in 1787.

71 Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 13 Aug. 1786, https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1284; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 148–49.

INDEX

Aberg, Einar, here, here, here

Addison, C. C., here

Adenhauer, Konrad, here

African Americans, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

fighting in WWII, here

violence against returning Black veterans, here

AIDS, here, here

Aiken, James, here, here, here, here, here, here

Aberg, Einar, here, here, here

Afghanistan, here, here

Allen, Karl, here, here

Allen, Wallace, here, here

America First, here, here, here, here

American Dissident Voices, here

American Examiner, here, here

American Federation of Conservative Organizations, here

American Gentile Army, here

American Independent party, here, here

American Jewish Committee, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

defense and organization of spying, here

begins spying on National Renaissance party, here

attitudes toward spying vs ADL and ANL, here, here

Joint-Fact Finding Committee with ADL, here, here, here

spying after Brown v. Board of Education, here, here, here, here, here, here

end of spying, here

American National party, here, here

American Nationalist party, here

American Nazi party, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

recruits and membership, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jews within, here, here, here

Andrews, E. E. “Shorty,” here, here, here, here

Animist party, here

Anniston (Ala), here

ANL, see Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League

anticommunism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Anti-Defamation League, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

defense and organization of spying, here,

attitudes toward spying vs AJC and ANL, here

Joint-Fact Finding Committee with AJC, here, here

spying after Brown v. Board of Education, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

division between Southern and Northern Jews, here

Anti-Defamation League Bulletin, here, here, here

antifascism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

anti-Muslim prejudice, here, here, here

Anti-Nazi League, see Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League

antisemitism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

in Congress, here

also see Columbians, Christian Identity, Stoner political parties, National Renaissance party, National States Rights party, American Nazi party, George Rockwell, James Madole, and various militias

Arab struggles, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Argentina

postwar Nazi revival, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Arlington (Va.), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Armstrong, Louis, here,

Arnall, Ellis, here, here, here, here

Arrowsmith, Harold, here

Aryan Brotherhood, here

Aryan Nations, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Aryan Nations Hour, The, here

Aryan Nations Liberty Net, here, here

Assembly of Racist Movements, here, here, here, here

Atlanta, Ga., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

as center of rightwing activity, here

as door to New South, here, here,

police membership in KKK, here

Atlanta Black Baptist Ministers’ Conference, here, here

Atlanta Constitution, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Atlanta Daily World, here, here

Atlanta Journal, here

Atlanta Law School, here, here

Atlanta Police Department, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Atlantis, here

Baltimore, here, here

Baltimore African-American, here

Baxley, Bill, here, here

Beam, Louis, here

Bedford, Nathan, KKK Klavern #1 (Atlanta), here, here, here, here, here

Belafonte, Harry, here

Benny, Jack, here, here

Berg, Alan, here

Berger, Mark, here

Bethel Baptist Church (Birmingham), here, here, here, here, here

Beth-El Synagogue (Birmingham), here

Betrayed Generation, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Biden, Joseph, here

Bilbo, Theodore, here, here

Birmingham (AL), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Birth of a Nation, The, here

Bishop, William, here, here, here, here, here, here

Black-Jewish Alliance, here, here, here, here

fracturing of, here, here, here, here, here

Black Lives Matter, here, here

Black Muslims, here, here, here

Black Nationalists, here

Black Power, here, here, here, here, here

Blacks, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Blacks see n as controlled by Jews, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Boebert, Lauren, here

bombing campaigns against Blacks and Jews, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Boorstin, Daniel, here

Botnick, Bea, here

Bowling, Richard, here

Bowling, Robert, here, here

Brady, Tom P., here

Branch Davidians, here

Brando, Marlon, here

Bremer, Arthur, here

Brewster, Willie Sr., here

Bright, George, here, here, here

British Imperial Fascist League, here, here

British National Socialist Movement, here

Brokaw, Tom,

Good War & Greatest Generation, here, here

Brown, John, see William Bishop

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Brownell Jr., Herbert, here, here

Burke, Emory, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

antisemitism and racism, here, here, here

on trial, here

Burnes, George, here

Burros, Daniel, here, here, here, here

Burros, Robert, here, here

Busbee, George, here

Butler, Richard Girnt, here, here, here, here

Buzzi, Mario, here, here, here

background, here

California Justice Department, here

California Rangers, here, here

Callaway, Judge A. W., here

Camp Norland, N.J., here

Capitol Insurrection, see U.S. Capitol storming of

Carradine, John, here

Carey, Hugh, here

Carlson, John Roy, here

Carter, Asa, here, 303n1

Carter, Jimmy, here

Cassidy, Edward, here

Catholic War veterans, here, here

Central High School (AR), here

Central Intelligence Agency, here, here, here, here

Chain-Ganged by the Jewish Gestapo, here

Chambliss, Robert “Dynamite Bob,” here, here, here

Chaney, James, here

Cheney, Lynn, here

Charleston (SC), here, here

Charlotte (NC), here

Charlottesville (Va), here, here, here

Chattanooga (TN), here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Chicago, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Chicago Defender, here, here,

Childers, Ralph, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here,

disillusionment with Columbians, here, here

Christ Not a Jew and Jews Not God’s Chosen People, here, here

Christian Anti-Jewish party, here, here,116, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Christian Defense League, here

Christian Identity, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Christian Identity Church of Jesus Christ—Christian, here, here, here

Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, here

Christian nationalism, here, here, here, here, here

Christian Nationalist Crusade, here, here, here, here

Christian Nationalist party, here,

Church of Jesus Christ—Christian, here, here, here, here, here

Church of Satan, here

Citizens’ Protective League, here

Civil Rights Act (1957), here, here

Civil Rights Act (1964), here

Cohen, Edwin, here

Cohen, Jerry, here

Cold War, here, here, here, here

Cole, Arthur, here

Colescott, James, here

Collin, Frank, here, here

Collings, James, here

Cologne (Germany), here

Columbia University, here, here, here, here

Columbian Workers Movement (aka Columbians), rise and fall, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

antisemitism and White Supremacy, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

gender roles, here

KKK refuses to ally with them, here

critique of KKK, here

violence against Blacks, Jews, enemies, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

membership, here, here

appeal of, here, here

housing patrols, here

Covenant, the Word, and the Arm of the Lord, here

Common Sense, here, here

communism/communists, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Communist party, here, here

Community Home Protective Association, here

Comparet, Bertrand, here

Confederate Underground, here, here, here, here

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), here, here, here, here

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Connor, Eugene “Bull,” here, here, here

Conrad, Earl, here

Cook, Eugene, here, here, here

Cook, Tom, here

Corrigan, John, here

Coughlin, Father Charles, here, here, here

Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), here

Cowan, Edna, here

Coyle, James and Mary, here

Crommelin, Jr., John G., here, here

Cross and the Flag, The, here

Crusade Against Corruption, here, here

Daily Worker, here

Dallas (TX), here, here

Davis, S. A., here, here

Dayton, here, here, here

Deatherage, George, here, here

DeGuello Report, here

Democratic party, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

DePugh, Robert Bolivar, here

Der Weg, here

Des Moines (IA), here

Detroit, here, here, here, here, here, here

Deutsch, Albert, here, here

Dickstein, Samuel, here, here

Dilling, Elizabeth, here

Dixiecrats, here

Dovale, Irene (also see Ruth Ross), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

Dowagiak (Michigan), here

Duke, Daniel, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background here

fist fight with Burke, here

works to bring down Columbians, here

Dupes, Ned, here

Dutton, Jerry, here

Eastland, James O., here

Eichmann, Adolf, here, here

Eisenhower, Dwight D., here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Elite Guard (NRP), here, here, here, here, here, here

Ellerin, Milton, here, here, here, here, here, here

Ellington, Duke, here

Elmhurst, Ernest, here, here

Engdahl, Per, here

Epstein, Benjamin, here, here, here, here

Exodus, here

evangelicals, here, here, here, here

Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), here, here, here

Falco, Gino, see Mario Buzzi

Farmer, James, here, here

Farrakhan, Louis, here

fascism/fascists, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Faubus, Orval, here

Federal Bureau of Investigation, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

antisemitism within, here

dismissive of civil rights, here

minimized Columbians, here

and NRP, here, here, here, here, here

and ANL, here, here, here, here, here, here

and AJC, here

and ADL, here, here

and post Hoover surveillance of far right, here, here

Federal Reserve System, here

Fields, Edward, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Madole and NRP, here, here, here

background, here

calls for death to Jews, here

and Rockwell, here, here, here, here, here

First National Directory of “Rightist” Groups, Publications and Some Individuals, here

Floyd, George, here

Foltz, Edwin, here, here

Foreman, Percy, here

Forrest, Renee, see Renee Fruchtbaum

Forster, Arnold, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

recruits Stetson Kennedy, here, here

France, here, here, here

Franco, Francisco, here, here

Frank, Leo, here, here

Frankhouser, “Riot Roy” Roy, here, here, here

Franklin, Carl, here

Free American, The, here

Freedom Riders, here, here

Friedman, Murray, here

Fruchtbaum, Renee, here, here, here, here

background, here

Führerprinzip, here

Furniss, Jim, here

Gaetz, Matt, here

Gale, William Potter, here, here, here

Garvey, Marcus, here, here

Gemeinschaft Schwarz-Weiss-Rot (Black-White-Red party), here, here

Georgia Bureau of Investigation, here, here, here

Gewinner, Holt, here

Germany, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

postwar attitudes toward Nazism, here

Gibbons, Benjamine D., here

Glendale (CA), here, here

Goebbels, Joseph, here, here, here

Goetz, Barbara von, here

Goldstein, Emanuel, here

Goldwater, Barry, here

Goodman, Andrew, here

Goring, William Lawrence “Butch,” here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

Gospel of Jesus Christ versus the Jews: Christianity’s Attitudes toward the Jews as Explained by the Holy Bible, The, here

Gray, Barry, here

Green, Dr. Samuel, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Greenberg, Jack, here

Greene, Marjorie Taylor, here

Griffin, Chester, here

Grubbs, Millard, here, here

Guide for Volunteer Christian Posses, here

Gulf War veterans, here, here

Hamil, Pete, here

Hamilton, Alexander, here

Hamilton, Charles, here

Hanes, Arthur Sr., here

Harlem, here, here, here, here

Hartford (Conn.), here

Hartsfield, William B., here, here, here

Hatenanny Records, here

Hayden Lake (ID), here, here, here

Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple (Atlanta) bombing, here, here, here, here, here

Heston, Charlton, here

Heyer, Heather, here

Hill, Herbert, here

Himmler, Heinrich, here

Hines, Clifford, here, here, here, here

Hitler, Adolf, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Hoff Jr., William “Wild Bill,” here, here, here

Hoffman, Clare, here

Holocaust denial, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Holstein, Leonard, here

homosexuality on far-right, here, here, here, here, here

Hoover, J. Edgar, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

dismissive of ADL and ANL, here

Hornsby, Marion, here

Houston, here, here, here

Hudson, Charles, here

“I Am an American Fascist,” (Exposé), here

Ice Cube, here

I Love You, I Hate You: My Six Weeks of Free Love with Pat Ward, here

Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, The, here

International Nazi Fascist—The Organ of Racial Fascism, The, here, here

International Patriotic Congress, here

International postwar fascist front, here, here

Iraq, here, here, here

Islamophobia, here, here

Israel, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jacksonville (Fla.), here, here, here, here, here

Japan, here, here

Jefferson, Thomas, here, here

Jefferson School of Social Science, here, here, here, here, here

Jelke, Mickey, here

Jett, Ira, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jewish Community Center (Nashville), here

Jewish Community Center (Jacksonville, Fla.), here

Jewish Ritual Murders, The, here

Jews, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

calls for extermination, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

also see American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation league, antisemitism, Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League

Jewish-Communist alliance/threat/conspiracy, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jewish Defense League, here

Jewish War Veterans resistance, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Joachim, Paul, here

John Birch Society, here, here, here, here, here, here

Johnson, James Weldon, here

Johnson, Jess, here, here

Johnson, Lyndon, here

Jones, Frank, here

Jones, Wayne, here

Jordan, Colin, here

Kahane, Rabbi Meir, here

Kahl, Gordon, here

Kamp, Joseph, here, here

Kasper, John, here, here, here

Kellman, Barnet, here, here

Kellman, George, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

Kelley, Clarence, here, here

Kennedy, John F., here, here, here

Kennedy, Robert, here, here, here

Kennedy, Stetson, here, here, here

early spying & background, here, here

goes to work for ADL, ANL, and Duke, here, here, here

spying on Columbians, here

Klan and Columbians go after him, here

interviews Stoner, here

Kennedy, Stephen, here

Kerr, Martin, here, here

Kill!, here

King, Jr., Martin Luther, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

King, Sr., Martin Luther, here

Kite, Clarence, here

KlanWatch, here, here

Klavalier Klub (KKK), here, here, here, here

Know Your Enemies’ Tactics, here

Knoxville (TN), here, here, here, here, here

Koehl, Matt, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Korean War, here, here, here

Koresh, David, here

Krauss, Peter, here

Kreis, August, here

Kristallnacht, here

Krüger, Gerhard, here, here

Ku Klux Klan (KKK), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

postwar revival, here, here

thwarted war-time alliance with German-American Bund, here, here

violence against Blacks, here, here, here

view Columbians and Stoner as too extreme, here, here, here

limits of Klan vs other far right groups, here, here

Kufuss, Friedrich, here

Kuniansky, Max, here

Kurtz, C. Daniel, here

LaCrosse (WI), here

Lancaster, Burt, here

Langrod, Jon, here, here

LaVey, Anton Szandor, here

Le Blanc Publications, here

Leary, Timothy, here, here

“leaderless resistance,” here, here, here, here

Leers von, Johann, here

Leese, Arnold, here, here

Lehr, Ian, here

Legion of Loyalty, here, here, here, here, here, here

Lewengrub, Stuart, here

Liberia: calls to deport Blacks there, here, here

Liberty League, here

Life, here

Lincke, George, here, here, here, here

Lisanik, Andrej, here

Little Rock (AR), here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Livingston, Sonny Kyle, here

Loomis, Homer, Jr., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

antisemitism and racism, here, here

on trial, here

Loomis, Homer, Sr., here, here, here, here, here

Los Angeles, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Louisville, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Lynch, Reverend Charles Conley “Connie,” here, here

lynchings, here, here, here, here, here

MacArthur, Douglas, here, here, here, here, here

MacDonald, Andrew (see William Luther Pierce)

MacFarland Jr., W. Henry, here, here

McCarthy, Joseph, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

McGill, Ralph, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

McGinley, Conde, here, here, here

McGovern, George, here, here

McInnes, Gavin, here

McVeigh, Timothy, here, here

Madagascar: calls to deport Blacks and/or Jews there, here, here, here, here

Maddox, Lester, here

Madole, Grace, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Madole, James, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Stoner and Fields, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

calls for death to Jews, here, here, here, here, here, here

vision of a new American government, here, here, here, here

falls in love with spy Dovale, here, here, here

and Rockwell, here, here, here, here, here, here

MAGA, here, here

Mahncke, Otto, here, here, here, here

Malcolm X, here

March on Washington D.C., here

Marietta (GA), here, here, here, here

Marshalltown (IA), here

Marx, Groucho, here, here

Matthews, Robert, here

Mein Kampf, here, here, here, here

Memphis, here, here

Mertig, Kurt, here, here

Metzger, Tom, here

Miami, here

militia movement, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, 303n1, 370n1

total members, here, here, here, here, here

Militia of Montana, here

Mintz, Bernard, here

Mintzer, George, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

organization of spying, here

background, here

Minutemen, here, here

Montgomery (AL), here, here, here, here, here

Morris, William Hugh, here, here, here

Moseley, Gen. George Van Horn, here, here, here, here

Mosely, Oswald, here

Mostaccio, Louis, here

Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), here, here

Muhammad, Elijah, here, here, here

Muslims, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Nash, John “Itchy Trigger Finger,” here, here

Nashville (TN), here, here, here

Nation of Islam, here, here, here, here

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

National Alliance, here, here

National Alliance Bulletin, here

National Citizens Protective Association, here, here

National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination, here,

National Renaissance party, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

attitude toward Blacks, here, here, here, here, here, here

attitude toward Jews, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

vision for a new government, here, here, here,

members, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

rallies, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jews within, here, here

end of NRP, here

National Renaissance Bulletin, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

National Socialist League (gay Nazis), here

National Socialist Mobilizer, here

National Socialist Party of America, here

National Socialist White People’s party, here

National Socialist World, here

National States Rights party, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

base of support and members, here, here, here, here

spies within, here, here

National Vanguard, here

National White Americans party, here

National Youth Alliance, here

nationalists, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, 303n1

Nationalist Action League, here

Nelsen, Maynard O., here, here

Newburgh (NY), here, here, here, here

New Order Knights, here

New Orleans, here, here, here, here, here, here

New Paltz (NY), here, here, here, here

Newsweek, here, here, here, here

New York Amsterdam News, here

New York City, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

New York City Police Department, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

New York Daily News, here

New York Post, here

New York Times, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Nippe, Kurt, here

Nixon, Richard, here, here, here

Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

defense and organization of spying, here, here

spying on Columbians, here

spying on NRP, here,

attitudes toward spying vs AJC and ANL, here, here

spying after Brown v. Board of Education, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

end of spying, here

also see James Sheldon.

Oklahoma City federal building bombing, here, here

Oath Keepers, here, here, here

Oakland City (Ga) Klavern, No. here, here

Obama, Barack, here, here, here

Order, here, here

Owensby, Vester, here

Palmetto Country, here

Pasadena, here

Patler, John, here, here, here, here, here, here

Patriotic National Center and School of Racial Studies and Leadership Training, here, here

Pattie, G. L., here

Pearson, Drew, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Pegler, Westbrook, here, here, here

Pelley, William Dudley, here

Pelosi, Nancy, here

Pence, Michael, here

Penland, Betty, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Perkins, Brady, here

Perkins, John, (aka S. Kennedy), here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Perlmutter, Nathan, here

Perry, Fred, here, here

Perry, W. J. “Jack,” here

Philadelphia, here, here, here, here, here

Phillips, McCandlish, here

Pierce, William Luther, here, here, 304n1

Pittsburgh, here

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), here

Pomeroy, Edgar, here

Posse Comitatus, here, here, here, here, here, here

members, here

Powell, James, here

Price, Jack, here, here

Protestant War Veterans of America, here

Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, here

Proud Boys, here, here, here, here, here

Provo (Utah), here

QAnon, here

Rabb, Norman, here

racism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

also see American Nazi party, Emory Burke, Columbians, James Madole, George Lincoln

Rockwell, National Renaissance party, National States Rights party, Jesse B. Stoner, Stoner Anti-Jewish

parties, antisemitism, White Supremacy

radio, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Randolph, A. Philip, here, here

Rankin, John, here,

Ray, James Earl, here

Ray, Jerry, here, here, here

Raye, Martha, here

Reading (Pa), here

Reagan, Ronald, here

Real Hate Mongers: The ADL, The, here

Realpolitical Institute, here

Redfeairn, Ray, here

Remer, Otto, here, here, here, here

Reporter A, here, here, here

Reporter B, here, here, here, here

Reporter BBB, here, here

Reporter GEC, here, here

Reporter W, here, here, here

Republican party, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Resistance Records, here

Reynolds, Robert, here

Rhodes, Elmer Stewart, here, here, here

Rich, John J., see Joe Rudden

Richmond, Al, here, here

Robeson, Paul, here

Robinson, Mark, here

Rockwell, George Lincoln, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

conversion experience, here

and Madole, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

and Fields, here, here

and Stoner, here, here

Rockwell (Aultman), Judith, here

Rockwell (Hallgrimsson), Thora, here, here

Rockwell Report, here, here

Rogers, Leslie, here

Rogge, O. John, here

Rooney, Mickey, here

Roosevelt, Franklin D., here, here

Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, here, here

Roth, Burnett, here

Rothchild, Jacob, here

Ruby Ridge Creek (ID) standoff, here, here

Rudel, Hans-Ulrich, here, here

Rudden, Joe, here, here, here, here, here, here

also see John J. Rich

Rustin, Bayard, here, here

Ryan, Seth, here, here

San Diego, here, here, here, here

San Francisco, here, here, here

Sanctuary, Eugene, here

Schmidt, Hans, here, here, here

Schwerner, Michael, here

Seattle, here, here, here

Security Echelon (NRP) here, here, here, here, here, here, here

September 11th (9/11), here

Sestito, Larry, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

Sheldon, Dorothy, here

Sheldon, James, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here, here

initial spying on Klan and Columbians, here

spying on Madole and NRP, here, here

threatened, here

and FBI, here, here

spying after Brown v. Board of Education, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

end of spying, here

Shelton, Robert, here,

Shoenfeld, Abraham, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

Shreveport (LA), here

Shuttlesworth, Reverend Fred, here, here, here

Sibley, Minnie, here, here, here

16th Street Baptist Church (Birmingham), here, here

Smith, Rev. Baily, here

Smith, Charles Lee, here

Smith, Gerald L. K., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

also see Christian Nationalist Crusade

Smythe, James, here

Socialist Reich party (German), here, here, here, here, here, here

Soros, George, here

Southern Christian Leadership Council, here, here, here

Southern Conference on Bombing, here

Southern Outlook, here, here, here

Southern Poverty Law Center, here, here, here, here, here, 370n1

Sovereign Citizens, here, here, here, here

Spain, here, here, here, here

Spingarn, Joel, here

States Rights Democratic party, here, here

States’ Rights Voters League, here

St. Augustine (FL), here

St. Louis, here, here, here

Stevenson, Adlai, here

Stone Mountain (GA), here, here, here

Stoner, Jesse B., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here

calls for extermination of Jews, here, here

calls for deportation of Blacks to Africa, here, here, here, here

too extreme for KKK, here

appeals to poorest whites, here, here, here, here, here

Madole and NRP, here, here, here, here, here, here

and Rockwell, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Stoner Anti-Jewish party, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Stormtrooper, here, here

Strange, Hubert, here

Strasser, Otto, here

Strickland, C. J., here

Streicher, Julius, here, here, here

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), here, here

Superman and the KKK radio show, here

Supreme Court, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Swastika Epidemic, here

Sweden, here, here, here, here

Swedish Anti-Jewish Action League, here, here,

Swift, Wesley, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Taft, Robert, here

Talmadge, Eugene, here, here

Tarrio, Enrique, here, here

Tea party, here

television, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Temple Beth-El (Bethesda, MD), here

Temple Beth-El (Birmingham, AL), here

Temple Beth-El (Charlotte, N.C.), here

Temple Beth-El (Miami), here

Temple Emanu-El (New York City), here

Temple Emmanuel (Gastonia, N.C.), here

Thompson, H. Keith, here, here, here, here, here

Three Percenters, here, here, here, 374n45

Thunderbolt, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Thurmond, Strom, here, here

Till, Emmett, here, here

Tournier, Edward, here

Trion (GA), here, here, here

Truhill, Mana, see Emmanuel Trujillo

Trujillo, Emmanuel, here, here, here, here

spying on NRP, here

background, here

and trial of the century, here

Reverend Immanuel [sic] Pardeahtan and Peyote Way Church of God, here, here

Truman, Harry, here, here

Trump, Donald, here, here, here, here, here

Truth Seeker, here, here, here, here, here

Turner Diaries, The, here, here, here

Ulasewicz, Tony, here

undercover work: referred to as “self-defense,” here, here, here

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

“Unite the Right” rally, here

United Nations, here, here, here, here, here

United White party, here, here, here

Universal African Nationalist Movement, here

Universal Negro Improvement Association, here, here

Untermyer, Samuel, here, here

United States Army Intelligence, here, here, here

United States Capitol storming of, here, here, here, here, here

United States Civil Rights Commission (1968), here

United States Congress, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), here

denies fascist threat, refuses investigation of Ku Klux Klan, here

“Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups” hearings and Report, here, here

United States Department of Justice, here, here

United States Naval Intelligence, here, here, here

Uplifted Curse, The, here

Urban League, here

Vancouver (Canada), here

Velde, Harold H., here

Velde Committee and report, here, here

Venable, James, here

veterans join far-right groups, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

also see Vietnam and Gulf veterans

Vick, Raymond, here, here

Vietnam veterans, here, here, here

Violence (1947)

Waco (TX) standoff, here, here

Wake Up America: The Story of the Columbians (1949), here

Waldman, Lester, here

Wallace, George, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Waller, Lanier, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

background, here, here

spies for ANL, here, here, here

Ward, Pat, here

Warner, James K., here, here, here, here

Washington, George, here, here

Washington, D.C., as a site of government and protest, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Washington Post, here,

Weaver, Randy, here

Weiser, Jack. J, here

Weiss, Arthur, here

Weiss, Frederick Charles, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Wells, Anthony, here

Westbrook, Charles, here, here

White American Nationalist party, here

White Aryan Resistance, here, here, here

White Castle riots, here, here, here

White Circle League, here

White Citizens Councils, here, here, here

spies within, here, here

White House picketing, here, here, here

White Party of America, here, here

White Power, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

White Sentinel, here, here

White Supremacy, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

divided by “too many führers” problem, here, here, here, here, here, here

number of far-right groups and members, here, here, here, here, here

also see Columbians, Stoner parties, National Renaissance party, National States Rights party,

American Nazi party, militia movements

Whitman, Roy, here, here

Winchell, Walter, here, here, here, here, here, here

Winrod, Gordon, here

Wichita, here

World Congress of Aryan Nations, here, here

World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, here

World Union of National Socialists, here,

World War II, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Wray, Christopher, here

Yankelovich, Daniel, here

Zimmerlee, John Henry, here, here

Zionism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), here, here

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

STEVEN J. ROSS is Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hitler in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Ross’s other works include Hollywood Left and Right, which received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Film Scholars Award, and Working-Class Hollywood, named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. Ross’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Washington Post, the International Herald-Tribune, and elsewhere, and he has appeared on NBC’s Today show, ABC’s World News Tonight and Nightline, and other programs both in the United States and abroad.

Also Available from Steven J. Ross

Hitler in Los Angeles
How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

A 2018 FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

“[Hitler in Los Angeles] is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding.” —Los Angeles Times

No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city’s Jews and to sabotage the nation’s military installations: Plans existed for murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast.

U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention—preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis—and only attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, they uncovered and foiled the Nazi’s disturbing plans for death and destruction. Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis’s undercover agents in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.

“A terrifying, revelatory and inspiring masterpiece.” —Jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History

“A remarkable tale . . . Mr. Ross has a novelist’s eye for characters and detail.” —The Wall Street Journal

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