Dixiecrats 

The rise of Donald Trump is a signal of the seething resentments that continue to define the American South, which have been exploited by the modern Republican Party in what has been called the Southern Strategy. The South has been particularly vulnerable to exploitation by cynical campaign managers, who recognize its significance as a voting bloc, which can be relatively easily mobilized by tapping into its nascent racial bigotry. The South is by far the largest region in the United States by population, representing 38% of the total, compared to 17.3% in the Northeast, 20.9% in the Midwest, and 23.8% in the West.[1]

According to Samuel DuBois Cook, “The 1950’s spawned a serious Republican effort to invade and conquer Dixie and establish a two-party system. Indeed, the surge of Republicanism is the most revolutionary wave in the drama of Southern politics since Populism.”[2] As indicated by Joseph E. Lowndes, author of From the New Deal to the New Right, “And as opposed to the Republican capture of the white South, we may better speak of a southern capture of the Republican Party.”[3] As Martin Durham explains in White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics, “The 1950s were a key moment for the American extreme right. The Brown decision was crucial to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, while subsequently the Liberty Lobby, then the National States Rights Party (NSRP), then the American Nazi Party, emerged as key organizations.”[4]

The old divide in the United States, along the Mason-Dixon Line, had been revived in 1948, when the Democratic National Convention in 1948 approved a strong civil rights plank despite firm opposition from Southern delegates. Southern Democrats split from the main body of the party to found the States’ Rights Democratic Party, known as the Dixiecrats, initiating a schism that would ultimately lead to the mass exodus of the Southern politicians to the Republican Party, firmly changing the nature of American politics.

The historical roots of the Dixiecrat movement are deep in U.S. history, in the “states’ rights” and racism of the antebellum South and the political philosophy of John Calhoun, founder of the Knights of the Golden Circle, predecessor of the Ku Klux Klan.[5] The Civil War and Reconstruction cemented these philosophies in the South with the region becoming the one-party “Solid South” after Reconstruction. From 1880 through 1924, with very few exceptions, Southern and border states voted reliably Democratic for president. Local and state offices were similarly dominated by Democrats.

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities such as schools, parks, and public transportation were legally permissible as long as they were equal in quality. This “separate but equal” doctrine legalized segregation in schools. This Act had little effect. An 1883 Supreme Court decision ruled that the act was unconstitutional in some respects, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations. With white southern Democrats forming a solid voting bloc in Congress, due to having outsize power from keeping seats apportioned for the total population in the South (although hundreds of thousands had been disenfranchised), Congress did not pass another civil rights law until 1957.

The New Deal had initially produced a political realignment in the United States, making the Democratic Party the majority, holding the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933–1969. Its base was in liberal ideas, the South, traditional Democrats, big city industry and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans, on the other hand, were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as a purported enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting part of it and promising to make it more efficient. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal Coalition, that dominated most presidential elections into the 1960s, while the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress from 1939 to 1964, until the advent the Goldwater campaign.

The New Deal Coalition was finally broken with the advent of the Dixiecrats, who unleashed a wave to conservative radicalism. Issues of racial injustice returned to the political fore in the 1940s, beginning with A. Philip Randolph’s (1889-1979) March on Washington movement in 1941, which resulted in Roosevelt’s 1941 Executive Order 8802 establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and banning employment discrimination by defense contractors. The publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in 1944 exposed American racism as an international embarrassment and forced mainstream political and intellectual leaders to finally address racial issues.

The monopoly that the Democratic Party held over most of the South had first showed major signs of breaking apart when, under Truman in 1948, the Democratic National Convention approved a progressive civil rights platform despite firm opposition from Southern delegates. Party leaders from Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina met in Birmingham, Alabama, and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, also known as “Dixiecrats,” nominated Strom Thurmond, for president and Governor Fielding Wright (1895-1956) of Mississippi for vice president, and issued a “declaration of principles” stating their opposition to “the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.”[6] Thurmond declared to the Birmingham meeting, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into schools and into our homes.”[7]

According to Jeff Sharlet, Thurmond, a 33º degree Scottish Rite Mason, was also one of the most long-standing associates of The Family. Thurmond produced “confidential” reports on legislation for the Family’s leadership, presided for a time over the Family’s weekly Senate meeting, and the Dixiecrat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia—Pat Robertson’s father—served on the behind-the- scenes board of the organization.[8]

The main plank of the States’ Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow laws. In an effort to reach out to the non-Southern Republican members of the Conservative Coalition, forged in the 1930s to oppose Roosevelt’s New Deal, Thurmond’s campaign rhetoric focused largely on states’ rights and limited government. “States’ rights” are political powers reserved for the state governments rather than the federal government. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states’ rights, a reversal of the position held by southern states prior to the Civil War. Some political analysts claim that the term was used as a code word to represent opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and to federal intervention on their behalf.[9] These “Dixiecrats” managed to win many Southern states, but collapsed as a party soon after the 1948 election.

Segregation of public schools was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court Justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism played on America’s international image. Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, proclaimed that “Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad,… the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile.”[10] British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester has written that, “Although the Court’s opinion in Brown made no reference to these considerations of foreign policy, there is no doubt that they significantly influenced the decision.”[11]

In some states, the decision took years to implement. As the movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s deepened racial tensions in much of the South, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon developed the infamous Southern Strategy. It successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

The forces of conservatism and reaction took a variety of forms, perpetuating the Dixiecratic legacy in terms of states’ rights, including the formation of the National States Rights Party (NSRP), the development of White Citizens Councils, the revival of the Klan, and the conversion to Republicanism as a method of protest.[12] The Citizens’ Councils, also referred to as White Citizens’ Councils, were an associated network of white supremacist organizations concentrated in the American South. The first was formed in 1954, and after 1956, it was known as the Citizens’ Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States, mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools, but they also opposed voter registration efforts and integration of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s.

States Rights Party

The key individual that tied these various organizations together was Shickshinny Knight and another close associate of General MacArthur, Marine Corps Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle (1893 – 1978), who inspired the Patriot Movement. Men like Willoughby, Major General Edwin Walker, Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle, and Major General George Van Horn Moseley, were in the forefront of the anti-Communist crusade in the United States.[13] Del Valle commanded the US Marines at Okinawa in June 1945. When he served with his forces in Ethiopia as U.S. observer, del Valle came to know Mussolini personally, who awarded him the Italian Medal of Bronze for Valor. After the war, he maintained good ties with Italy’s “Black Prince” Junio Valerio Borghese, whom he had first met during the Ethiopia campaign.[14] Del Valle was a close friend of Ezra Pound.[15] Del Valle was also involved with the ASC-affiliated American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, founded by John Trevor Sr. and bankrolled by Wickliffe Draper.[16]

Del Valle, who was prone to quote the Protocols of Zion, believed that American democracy was under attack by a communist conspiracy led by Jews, using the United Nations as a front to take over the world. In 1953, with other high-ranking officers, he created the Defenders of the American Constitution. In a letter to General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, with copies to Merwin K. Hart, Conde McGinley, Major R.H. Williams, California Senator Jack Tenney and fellow Shickshinny Knight Lt. General A.C. Wedemeyer, del Valle called for the creation of The Minutemen of America to defend American from the danger of a communist threat.[17]

Del Valle was yet another close associate of Merwin K. Hart.[18] In 1952, Hart was part of the Nationalist Convention meeting in Chicago sponsored by Conde McGinley’s anti-Semitic paper Common Sense, co-owned by del Valle.[19] The convention, which took place the weekend before the opening of the Republican Party National Convention which nominated Eisenhower to head their party’s ticket, was attended by Elizabeth Dilling, Myron Fagan, F.C. Sammons a long-time associate of Gerald L.K. Smith, William J. O’Brian, Upton Close, Kenneth Goff from Soldiers of the Cross, a Minutemen affiliate, W. Henry MacFarland and Allen Zoll.[20]

MacFarland, another associate of Gerald L.K. Smith, was an associate editor to the newspaper Common Sense. MacFarland was the founder of the Nationalist Action League in 1948, which was designated as “fascist” by the US Attorney General. MacFarland later abandoned the League and reorganized the group as the American Flag Committee in August 1950.

Kenneth Goff was the 1944 national chairman of Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Youth for America. Goff was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) between 1936 and 1939, when he testified before the Dies Committee. He claimed that while in the CPUSA he infiltrated youth organizations and worked for Communist front organizations, maintaining ties with communist leaders in both America and the Soviet Union, working towards a communist revolution in the United States.[21] Another convention was held in Chicago, also in 1958, sponsored by Joseph Beauharnais of the White Circle League and John W. Hamilton of the Citizens Protective Association with the stated purpose of forming a new organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), basically a copy of the NAACP.

In 1952, McGinley, Dilling, Beauharnais, Goff and Hart had been among a number of participants in the founding of the Constitution Party.[22] For the presidential election of that year, they nominated Douglas MacArthur for President and Harry F. Byrd for Vice-President, without permission from either candidate. In 1956, they called themselves the States’ Rights Party in Virginia, and in 1960 chose retired Marine Corps Brigadier General Merritt B. Curtis with Curtis Bean Dall from the Liberty Lobby as his running mate. Delegates for the Constitution Party in Indianapolis in 1963 included Willam Potter Gale of the Christian Identity movement, Curtis Dall, Richard Cotten, Pedro del Valle, Archibald Roberts, Kenneth Goff, Joseph Adams Milteer representing the NSRP and Georgia’s Citizens Council, plus Klan leaders Jack Brown and James Venable.[23]

Del Valle was also in contact with J. Paul Thornton, a California organizer for the NSRP.[24] Founded in July 1958 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the NSRP grew out of a confluence of members from the Klan and the Constitution Party, established by Merwin K. Hart.[25] Founded in 1952 as the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, the Atlanta-based NSRP was led by Stonor and Fields. According to the Guguello Report, Fields was the “poor relative” of two very wealthy Chicago Jewish families, while J.B. Stoner, was a homosexual Jew who formerly worked as an ADL investigator out of the Miami, Florida office of the B’nai B’rith.[26] In 1941, at age seventeen, Stoner was a local organizer for the America First Committee (AFC). The next year he joined the Associated Klans of America—colloquially known as the “Old Klan”—in Chattanooga and became a Klan organizer.

In the late 1950s, the NSRP developed close ties with the NRP. Like the White Defense League and the National States Rights Party (NSRP), the NRP was another Northern League affiliate. The FBI noted that Peter Huxley-Blythe, who helped Roger Pearson found the Northern League, was its “representative in the U.S.,” and reported that it was “secretly allied” with the NSRP.[27] Matt Koehl, a member of Elite Guards of the NRP, was also a founding member of the United White Party, formed in 1957, and out of which emerged the NSRP.

Fields came into contact with the NRP in 1954 when he visited Mana Truhill’s apartment and found it littered with communist propaganda and a picture of Stalin. Fields also developed close ties with NRP founder James Madole and Eustace Mullins. Mullins worked closely with John Kasper who would later become the NSRP’s 1964 presidential candidate.[28] Fields was the publisher of NSRP’s official publication, The Thunderbolt, which had a large circulation among Ku Klux Klan members in the 1960s. The NSRP saw its influence decline in the 1970s as chief ideologue Fields began to devote more of his energies to the Klan.[29]

Minutemen

NSRP officials argued for states’ rights against the advance of the civil rights movement, and the organization itself established relations with the Ku Klux Klan and Minutemen.[30] The Minutemen were a militant anti Communist organization formed by Robert DePugh in 1960. DePugh enlisted in the Army during World War II. DePugh avoided questions about his military service, but a court document revealed that his army discharge was based on a psychiatric assessment that described him as: “psychoneuris… schizoid personality and incipient schizophrenia.”[31] He attended Kansas State University for a few months before dropping out. He enrolled at Washburn University briefly, then started BioLab, another veterinary drug firm, in Norborne, Missouri. According to a 1967 article by William Turner in Ramparts, Biolab’s net worth at the time was reported at $350,000, and its majority stockholders are two Jewish businessmen from Chicago.[32]

DePugh became a member of the John Birch Society but was dropped because of his paramilitary activities. Believing that Communism would soon take over all of America, they organized themselves into small cells and stockpiled weapons in anticipation of a counter-revolution. They become among the most feared right-wing groups of their time, because of their tendency for violence and disregard for the law. In a detailed study, John George and Laird Wilcox discovered that the Minutemen were among the most thoroughly infiltrated domestic far-right groups by the government.[33] Perhaps the largest Minutemen division was Goff’s Soldiers of the Cross.

The governing body of the Minutemen was the National Council, composed of DePugh, Rev. Goff and Troy Haughton. According to the Deguello Report, Haughton offered DePugh to merge a San Diego group of homosexuals with the Minutemen, and became DePugh’s West Coast lieutenant. Haughton was later publicly identified as a homosexual but apparently convinced DePugh that this was part of some “communist frame-up.” Haughton was arrested in 1961 for failure to register as a sex offender.  According to Sgt. Orr, “Houghton has a string of arrests, dating back to 1948, including suspicion of delinquency, burglary, grand theft and traffic warrants. On March 1, 1957, he was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure.” Houghton claims he was sunbathing.[34] DePugh continued to let Haughton serve as his West Coast Coordinator for several years. Haughton disappeared in 1967, and it has been rumored that he was assassinated by the Minutemen to avoid further embarrassment from his further sexual perversions.[35] Some researchers believe that Haughton may have been the Zodiac Killer, the American serial killer who operated in Northern California from at least the late 1960s to the early 1970s, and who signed his letters with a crosshair-like symbol, similar to that used by the Minutemen.[36]

DePugh publicly declared in 1967, “when fascism comes to the United States it will come in the guise of anti-Communism.”[37] “We have penetrated this organization,” FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover fatuously boasted, “and our sources keep us posted on developments.” In 1962, according to the Ramparts article, Jerry Milton Brooks, who was once convicted of extortion and joined the Minutemen soon after their inception where he became known to his comrades as “the rabbi,” served as DePugh's intelligence and security officer. Brooks, who brought out secret membership lists after he left the organization, counted the active membership at 8000, but also pointed out that out that adding the Soldiers of the Cross and the other groups the figure rose to about 80,000. The real danger was the elite corps of 3500 who have survived the rigorous Five Phases of Training and had taken an oath of loyalty to the Minutemen. In 1965, DePugh was arrested on the complaint of two girls who informed police that “DePugh told us he wanted us to seduce men in the high government. He told us he would take pictures and tape recordings and use them as blackmail to infiltrate the government.”[38]

DePugh boasted of having planted infiltrators in such organizations as the Democratic Party, the American Nazi Party, and the FBI, as well as organizations like the Black Muslims, CORE, SNCC, and peace groups. The Minutemen’s files contained not only such material as FBI member lists and intelligence on B'nai B'rith and the National Council of Churches, as well as dossiers on Dr. Fred Schwarz and his Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, Billy James Hargis and his Christian Crusade, the KKK and the Nazis. The 1962 plot against Senator Fulbright was instigated by a fanatic from Dallas, going by the pseudonym John Morris, who was committed to a mental institution.

American Nazi Party

Also affiliated with the founding of the NSRP was George Lincoln Rockwell, who was discharged from the United States Navy because of his political views, broke with James Madole’s National Renaissance Party (NRP) to form his own organization, the American Nazi Party (ANP), with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. As explained by Goodrick-Clarke, “A mixture of clowning and provocation characterized all of Rockwell’s public appearances.”[39] George’s father, Lovejoy “Doc” Rockwell (1889 – 1978), was an American vaudeville performer and radio personality. When Rockwell was growing up, regular house guests at his father’s household included Fred Allen, Benny Goodman and Groucho Marx. After graduating from Hebron Academy, one of the nation’s oldest endowed preparatory schools in the United States, Rockwell attended Brown University in 1938, where he first became politically engaged in the campaign to get General Douglas MacArthur elected president and adopted the corncob pipe, following MacArthur's example. A woman in the campaign introduced him to McCarthy’s speeches, McGinley’s Common Sense, and to Gerald L.K. Smith. Rockwell then became convinced of the existence of a worldwide Jewish-communist conspiracy.[40] Rockwell also became an Beauharnais and from the late 1950s on, del Valle maintained a friendly correspondence Rockwell, providing him with occasional financial contributions.[41]

Rockwell accused H. Keith Thompson of trying to infiltrate the ANP, and claimed that Thompson circulated among New York’s homosexual community and was particularly close to some “Nazi pansies… a group of queers who call themselves the ‘real’ National Socialists.”[42] According to the Deguello Report which appeared in 1976 and purported to be the product of research by a number of members of various Western intelligence agencies, Madole was financed by wealthy Jews and was part of the homosexual infiltration of the American right. According to the Report, among the homosexuals that served in the ANP headquarters, at one time or another, were John Patler, Roy Frankhouser, Dan Burros, James K. Warner, and NRP member William Pierce. Dan Burros had an intermittent homosexual affair with Roy Frankhouser.[43]

Burros served in the Army under General Edwin Walker in Little Rock. He began corresponding with ex-Nazis, including Hans-Ulrich Rudel.[44] Burros was also influenced by Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium.[45] Burros joined the BNP in early 1960. And soon after moved to Arlington, Virginia to join the ANP. In 1961, Burros left the ANP and moved back to New York with fellow Nazi John Patler. They started a magazine whose first issue in 1962 featured a noosing with the words “Impeach the Traitor John F. Kennedy.”[46] It was Burros’ address in New York that Lee Harvey Oswald had in his notebook.

Burros also carried on an intermittent homosexual affair at the Nazi Headquarters with NSRP member James Warner, who at the time considered himself an Odinist. Burros had confided to Warner that like himself, Ed Fields was a Jew.[47] After Warner left the NSRP, leadership of the Party was taken over by J.B. Stoner. Stoner earned a law degree, and served as the attorney for James Earl Ray, who was convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr.[48] The FBI also considered Stoner to be a suspect in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and in several bombings of synagogues and black churches during the 1950s and 1960s, such as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Soon after leaving the Army, Frankhouser joined the ANP and was described as Rockwell’s protege. At about the same time, he also joined Stoner’s NSRP. By the early 1960s, Frankhouser became involved in Robert Shelton’s United Klans of America. He became Grand Dragon for Pennsylvania in 1965. At the same time, he also became involved in the Minutemen led by DePugh, before finally being exposed as a paid informant for the FBI and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Tax Division of the Treasury Department, who received his reward money through the Jewish Community Center in Reading, Pennsylvania.[49] In 1965, Frankhouser interested Burros in the KKK.[50] After a falling-out with Rockwell, Burros became a Kleagle, or recruiter, for the New York State branch of the United Klans of America, the most violent Klan group of the time.[51] Burros committed suicide in Frankhouser’s apartment in 1965 upon seeing the headline of a New York Times article revealing Burros’ Jewish background, whose true name was Daniel Sonnstein. At the time, he was reportedly listening to music composed by Richard Wagner.[52] In a press conference, Rockwell praised Burros’ dedication. but railed against Jews, whom he referred to as “a unique people with a distinct mass of mental disorders” and ascribed Burros’ instability and suicide to “this unfortunate Jewish psychosis.”[53] Nevertheless, Rockwell was assassinated by Patler in 1967. Rockwell was portrayed Marlon Brando in the television miniseries Roots: The Next Generations, where he is interviewed by Alex Haley, as a writer for Playboy, portayed by James Earl Jones.

Liberty Lobby

James Warner formed an organization called Sons of Liberty using the various mailing lists he had stolen from the ANP and the NSRP. According to the Deguello Report, “This was only marginally profitable so he then went into partnership with Willis Carto and Roger Pearson in the publication of Western Destiny.”[54] The patriot movement has been traced back to the 1950s. The reformist wing of the movement is considered to have the John Birch Society, and its opposition to communism, the United Nations and the civil rights movement, while an insurgent wing has been traced in origins to the Liberty Lobby, with promotion of themes of White supremacy and anti-Semitism.[55] The Liberty Lobby, which was founded in 1958 by Willis Carto (1926 – 2015), is regarded as the source of an insurgent wing of the Patriot Movement through its promotion of themes of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. According to Carto:

Hitler’s defeat was the defeat of Europe; and America. How could we have been so blind? The blame, it seems, must be laid at the door of the international Jews… if Satan himself with all of his superhuman genius and diabolical ingenuity at his command, had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.[56]

Carto as well was associated with Merwin K. Hart. Carto’s ties to Hart went back to the 1950s, with an organization known as the Congress of Freedom, which was comprised of conservatives strongly opposed to the United Nations. Its advisory committee included Shickshinny Knight Pedro Del Valle.[57] Robert LeFevre, the founder of the Freedom School, who was vice-president of Hart’s NEC, was also a director of the Congress of Freedom.[58]

The Liberty Lobby was run by a steering committee which included ASC members General Charles A. Willoughby of the the Shickshinny Knights, John Birch Society members Major General Edwin Walker and Robert J. Morris, and Senator Strom Thurmond.[59] On the Liberty Lobby’s policy board were Joseph P. Kamp, the founder of the Constitutional Education League, Tyler Kent who was imprisoned in the Tower of London during World War II for sharing information with the enemy while a member of the American embassy staff, R.G. Johnson author of Patriots of Northern Arkansas, Lt. Col. Frederick A. Kibbe the founder for the Florida Minutemen, Archibald E. Roberts who served as the information officer for General Walker and Lt. Gen George E. Stratemeyer.[60] Stratemeyer was a member of the Military Affairs Committee of the Shickshinny Knights.[61]

Starting in October 1966, two American journalists, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson—one of the best-known American columnists of his day—published a series of stories in their widely-syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column which recounted the findings of a former employee, Jeremy Horne. Horne said he had discovered a box of correspondence between Willis Carto and numerous government officials establishing the Joint Council of Repatriation (JCR), a forerunner organization to the Liberty Lobby. The JCR stated that their fundamental purpose was to “repatriate” blacks “back to Africa.” Ex-Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Thomas Pickens Brady and various members of the White Citizens’ Councils who had worked to establish the JCR, also contributed to the founding of Liberty Lobby. Other correspondence referred to U.S. Congressional support for the emerging Liberty Lobby, such as from Strom Thurmond, and California US Representative James B. Utt.

Yockey was continuously pursued by the FBI for over a decade and was finally arrested in 1960, when authorities discovered falsified passports and birth certificates in his suitcase. “This is not a small fish. This is a man that we are very, very interested in,” a U.S. government source told the San Francisco Examiner.[62] While in prison for possessing falsified passports, Francis Parker Yockey was visited by Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, who eventually became the chief advocate and publisher of his ideas. On June 17, 1960, after 11 days in prison, Yockey committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Betraying his interest in the occult, papers found at the time of his arrest included his own essays on the principle of polarity in the psyche, a book on palmistry and politics, and a bibliography of books on the “second body,” on reincarnation and on cosmic rays.[63]

When Roger Pearson established himself in the United States in the 1960s, he worked together with Carto in contributing to publications of white supremacist and anti-Semitic literature, such as Western Destiny, a Liberty Lobby publication. The magazine had over two dozen racialists and anti-Semites on its masthead, including Austin App and C.M. Goethe, honorary president of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies (ACPS).[64] Arthur Ehrhardt was a member of Pearson’s Northern League and regular contributor to Western Destiny. In 1956, Lincoln Rockwell was hired as a writer for Western Destiny, before founding the American Nazi Party in 1960.[65] 1966, Western Destiny merged with The American Mercury.[66]

Christian Identity

Carto eventually became an adherent of Christian Identity, a racist and white supremacist interpretation of Christianity.[67] Christian Identity, which traces its origins to British-Israelism and the pre-Adamite hypothesis first proposed by La Peyrère—Menasseh ben Israel’s co-conspirator—offers a racist interpretation of Christianity where in some cases non-whites are regarded to not have souls.[68] British-Israelism, which gained influence in Britain during the nineteenth century, before being imported to the United States, teaches that many white Europeans are the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel and God’s Chosen People, whereas modern Jews are Khazars and impostors.[69] By the 1960s, when Christian Identity was established as an important influence on the extreme right, the Khazar ancestry of the Jews was firmly believed.

NPR member Eustace Mullins repeated Christian Identity claims in a strange work called The Curse of Canaan. Mullins followed the course of history as a battle between the descendants of Shem against the descendants of Canaan. The descendants of Canaan, he claims, are polluted through interbreeding with a “pre-Adamite” population, who are black-skinned, and with demons from the time of the Sons of God of Genesis. Throughout history they represented parasitical merchants, beginning with the Phoenicians and down to the Black Nobility of our time. The descendants of Shem, or Semites, he believes, should not be confused with the Jews, who are impostors descended from Edomite Khazars. The descendants of Shem are the builders of civilization, and ancestors of the Irish. Thus, explains Mullins, “the history of mankind for the past three thousand years has been the history of struggle between the fair-skinned descendants of Shem and the darker-skinned descendants of his brother, Ham, yet you will not find this struggle defined in any historical work.”[70]

A key developer of the Christian Identity ideology was Col. William Potter Gale, a former senior intelligence officer on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff, who helped him found the Christian Defence League. Gale was also in contact with Shickshinny Knight Pedro Del Valle. Del Valle publicly endorsed Iron Curtain Over America, published in 1951 by John Beaty, which argued in Iron Curtain that both Russia and America were under the control of the Khazars. Beaty further claimed that the Khazars, after taking control over the Democratic Party, tricked America into war with Germany to kill off as many Aryans as possible. Del Valle publicly endorsed Beaty’s book and helped him distribute copies to select military officers, like Stratemeyer. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) asked Stratemeyer to repudiate the book, but he refused to do so and instead publicly attacked the ADL.[71]

Gale’s superior officer would have been General Charles Willoughby. Journalist Dick Russell alluded to the possibility that Willoughby and del Valle, were behind Gale’s early 1960’s efforts to organize a patriotic paramilitary underground, named the “Rangers,” to train to assassinate, sabotage, and overthrow the “People’s Democracy.”[72] By Gale’s own admission, del Valle and Colonel Benjamin von Stahl were among the military officers who suggested the founding of the Posse Comitatus.[73]

Gale had been an associate of Klansman Wesley Swift, who in the 1950s was the West Coast representative of Gerald L.K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade, and became a significant figure in the early Christian Identity movement. In 1946, Swift burned a cross near Big Bear Lake, California and lectured to the American Legion about “the new Klan” and its mission to save America from Communism and race-mixing. The Attorney General’s office found that not only had Swift organized his own KKK faction, the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire, but was conducting paramilitary training for Klansmen in the Antelope Valley desert.[74]

In that same year, Swift founded his own religious denomination: The Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Originally known as the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation. The denomination grew steadily throughout California in the 1950s, with branches in San Francisco, Oakland, Lancaster, Riverside, Hollywood and San Diego. There was also a Church center in St. Petersburg, Florida under the Rev. Oren Potito, Swift’s East Coast coordinator and an organizer for the National States’ Rights Party (NSRP), a Neo-Nazi and Klan fusionist group whose leaders would later serve time for bombing a Black church in Birmingham and a Jewish temple in Atlanta. Swift’s own lieutenant and co-preacher in California, the Rev. Charles “Connie” Lynch, also served as the NSRP’s state leader, as well as a “traveling parson” at Ku Klux Klan rallies across the South.[75]

Gale became a leading figure in the anti-tax and paramilitary movements of the 1970s and 1980s, beginning with the California Rangers and the Posse Comitatus, and helped to found the militia movement. The group is named after legislation known as Posse Comitatus, which southern Democrats pushed through Congress in 1878 to constrain the government’s ability to protect black southerners from violence and discrimination.[76] Posse Comitatus charters were issued in 1969 in Portland, Oregon, by Henry Lamont Beach, a one-time member of the Silver Shirts.

Gale warned that a satanic Jewish conspiracy disguised as communism was corrupting public officials and the courts, undermining the United States and wrecking its divinely-inspired Constitution. Jews, explained Gale, were offspring of the devil, while non-whites were “mud people” and whites were the real Hebrews of the Bible. “Arise and fight!” Gale preached in an infamous sermon broadcast to Kansas farmers in 1982. “If a Jew comes near you, run a sword through him,” he summoned them. But, it turns out that Gale was himself descended on his father’s side from a long line of devout Jews, as explained Daniel Levitas.[77]

Gale in turn introduced Swift to another ex-Silver Shirt, Richard Butler, who in the 1970s founded the Aryan Nations, originally based in Hayden Lake, Idaho. Butler had introduced Lincoln Rockwell to Christian Identity in the early 1960s. In June 1964, Rockwell met with Wesley Swift to discuss a close working relationship, motivated by Rockwell’s view that the American Nazi Party needed a pseudo-Christian theology to attract more members. Aryan Nations included such notorious far-right leaders as ex-Texas Grand Dragon of the KKK, Louis Beam, and White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger.

In 1963 or 1964, Dennis Mower, one of Troy Haughton’s homosexual partners, became Swift’s chauffeur. After Haughton disappeared, Mower, along with another homosexual ex-Minuteman named Don Sisco, joined Anton’s LaVey’s Church of Satan in San Francisco. James Warner began attending the Satanic Church about this time and became acquainted with Mower.[78] DePugh knew Gale and structured his organization after Gale’s Rangers. DePugh, who was briefly associated with the Liberty Lobby, and later became involved in the Identity Christianity movement. In 1969, DePugh was convicted and sentenced for eleven years for firearms violations and bond jumping. He later collaborated with United Klans of America leader Robert Shelton on a project called Committee of 10 Million, an ultraconservative umbrella group of patriots to overthrow the American government. In 1991, DePugh was tried but acquitted on a morals and pornography charge when authorities found photos of young girls and several weapons.[79]

[1] “Table Tables.” Population Clock. United States Census Bureau (2017).

[2] Samuel DuBois Cook. “Political Movements and Organizations.” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1964), p. 130.

[3] Joseph E. Lowndes. From the New Deal to the New Right: Rae and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 6.

[4] Martin Durham. White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics (Routledge, 2007), p. 115.

[5] Thomson Gale. “Dixiecrats.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008).

[6] “The Sons of Liberty.” Knights of the Golden Circle (July 16, 2011). Retrieved from http://knights-of-the-golden-circle.blogspot.com/2011/07/sons-of-liberty.html

[6] Kari Frederickson. The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South (Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 240.

[7] Ibid., p. 242.

[8] Sharlet. The Family, p. 19.

[9] Taylor Branch. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). p. 242.

[10] Mary L Dudziak. “Brown as a Cold War Case.” Journal of American History (June 2004).

[11] Antonly Lester, “Brown v. Board of Education Overseas” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (Vol 148, No. 4, December 2004).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Levenda. The Hitler Legacy.

[14] Kevin Coogan. “Defenders of the American Constitution and the League of Empire Loyalists: The First Postwar Anglo-American Revolts Against the ‘One World Order’.” International Institute of Social History (2006). Retrieved from https://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/coogan.doc

[15] A. David Moody. Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume III: The Tragic Years 1939-1972 (Oxford University Press, 2105).

[16] Robert Wald Sussman. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Harvard University Press, 2014).

[17] Coogan. “Defenders of the American Constitution and the League of Empire Loyalists.”

[18] Arnold Foster & Benjamin R. Epstein. Cross-Currents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956), p. 145.

[19] Tucker. The Funding of Scientific Racism, pp. 61-62.

[20] Forster & Epstein. Cross-Currents, p. 55.

[21] Jeffrey Kaplan. Encyclopedia of white power: a sourcebook on the radical racist right (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 120.

[22] item#: 3-6A-2-35-1-1-1ph. Sovereignty Commission Online. Mississippi Archives (accessed August 07, 2011).

[23] Michael Newton. “The National States Rights Party: A History.” (McFarland, 2017), p. 101.

[24] Coogan. “Defenders of the American Constitution and the League of Empire Loyalists.”

[25] A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Transaction Publishers, 1949), p. 196; Turner. Power on the Right, p. 165.

[26] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[27] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, p. 479.

[28] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, p. 458.

[29] “National States Rights Party.” Metapedia (accessed May 25, 2017).

[30] Clive Emsley & Haia Shpayer-Makov. Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950 (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006), p. 237.

[31] James Moore & Jim Moore. Very Special Agents: The Inside Story of America's Most Controversial Law Enforcement Agency--the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 83.

[32] William W. Turner. “The Minutemen.” Ramparts (January, 1967).

[33] Kathy Marks. Faces of Right Wing Extremism (Boston: Brandon Books, 1996), p. 40.

[34] “State ‘Guerrilla’ Chief Arrested in San Diego.” Los Angeles Times (November 11, 1961).

[35] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[36] “Troy Houghton: The Minuteman.” Retrieved from http://zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=414; “Troy Houghton aka Haughton.” Retrieved from https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiackillerfr/troy-houghton-aka-haughton-t4692.html

[37] William W. Turner. “DePugh and the Minutemen: Wonderland of the Mind,” Ramparts (June 1970).

[38] William W. Turner. “The Minutemen.” Ramparts (January, 1967).

[39] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 8.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Coogan. “Defenders of the American Constitution and the League of Empire Loyalists.”

[42] Ibid., p. 511.

[43] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[44] James Lateer. Three Barons: The Organizational Chart of the JFK assassination (TrineDay, 2017).

[45] McCandlish Phillips. “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” New York Times (October 31, 1965), p. 1.

[46] James Lateer. Three Barons: The Organizational Chart of the JFK assassination (TrineDay, 2017).

[47] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[48] “James Earl Ray’s Brother Stays At Stoner Headquarters.” Times Daily (February 20, 1978).

[49] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[50] James Lateer. Three Barons: The Organizational Chart of the JFK assassination (TrineDay, 2017).

[51] Ted Robert Gurr. Violence in America: The History of Crime (Sage, 2004), pp. 142–143.

[52] The Believer DVD, “An Interview with Director Henry Bean,” (2001).

[53] William H. Schmaltz. Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (1999), g. 263.

[54] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[55] Stuart T. Wright. Patriots, politics, and the Oklahoma City bombing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). pp. 54–55; Matthew Lyons & Chip Berlet. Right-wing populism in America: too close for comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). pp. 288–289.

[56] Drew Pearson. “Liberty Lobby Should be Scrutinized.” The Free Lance-Star (February 17, 1967).

[57] Foster & Epstein. Cross-Currents, p. 145.

[58] Turner. Power on the Right, p. 165.

[59] Constantine. Virtual Government, p. 11.

[60] Pearson. “Liberty Lobby Should be Scrutinized.”

[61] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, pp. 606-608.

[62] Martin A. Lee. “John William King Quotes Francis Parker Yockey in Statement About Hate Crime.” Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty Law Center, June 13, 2000).

[63] Ibid., p. 83.

[64] Bellant. The Coors Connection, p. 60.

[65] Pate McMichael. Klandestine: How a Klan Lawyer and a Checkbook Journalist Helped James Earl Ray Cover Up His Crime (Chicago Review Press, 2015). p. 43.

[66] Ibid.

[67] “Willis Carto.” Southern Poverty Law Center (n.d). Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/willis-carto

[68] Chester L. Quarles. Christian Identity: The Aryan American Bloodline Religion (McFarland & Company. 2004) p. 68.

[69] Jeffrey Kaplan. Encyclopedia of white power: a sourcebook on the radical racist right (McFarland & Company, 2000), p. 52.

[70] Eustace Mullins. The Curse of Canaan: A Demonology of History (Revelation Books, 1987).

[71] Coogan. “Defenders of the American Constitution and the League of Empire Loyalists.”

[72] Dick Russell. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Da Capo Press, 2003), pp. 111-112.

[73] Cheri Seymour. The Committee of the States (Camden Place Communications, 1991), p. 86.

[74] Michael Marinacci. “Wesley Swift and the Church of Jesus Christ - Christian.” Califia’s Children (January 26, 2015).

[75] Ibid.

[76] Kevin Carey. “Too Weird for The Wire,” Washington Monthly (July 2008).

[77] Daniel Levitas. “What is behind the rare-but-recurring phenomenon of Jewish anti-Semites?” Intelligence Report, Winter 2002, Issue Number: 108

[78] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Deguello Report (1976?).

[79] Kathy Marks. Faces of Right Wing Extremism (Boston: Brandon Books, 1996), p. 40.

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio