Blood and Politics (15 page)

At the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord’s commune and inside the Christian-Patriots Defense League’s survival zone, the idea of a racial nation was larded with concerns about communist invasions and surviving an eschatological End Times. But at the so-called Nehemiah Township, the ideal of a government—complete with territorial borders, police powers, and taxes—assumed an explicit, even if fanciful, form. Here those calling themselves Aryan Freemen were citizens, governed by what they called common law. Under this common law, contracts were to be signed, courts established, juries picked, and judges selected. And like any state apparatus worthy of the name, Nehemiah Township was to be protected by its own armed forces: a Posse Comitatus and a militia. The charter went so far as to establish the parameters of these militarized bodies. “The Posse Comitatus shall confine its activities to the Shire wherein it is chartered. The Militia shall not be confined to any boundary during its operation.” In other words, as in Olde England,
this posse operated only at the county level, while the militia could range free.
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No roads or highways traveled to this township. No sewer lines were built or water wells dug. And no one lived in any houses there. As an expression of a proposed white Christian nation-state, however, the ideas that animated Nehemiah Township reverberated across several decades. In 1983, after a planning meeting for a North Dakota township ended, two federal marshals were killed. In 1984 a group known as The Order murdered three men and stole from bank cars in the name of an Aryan state. In the mid-1990s, common law juries convened and militias were mustered in the name of white Christian Freemen. And the seed for these events was planted in July 1982, outside the tourist town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, at the occasion of the Aryan Nations’ annual congress where the Nehemiah Township documents were signed.

During most of the 1980s this Aryan World Congress was the movement’s premier social event of the summer season. Attendance varied. At its height, three hundred to five hundred men, women, and children spent the night in tents, RVs, or nearby motels for three days.
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A twenty-acre compound included a church and meeting hall, two trailers for office space, and a bunkhouse with twenty-four beds. A fifty-foot-high guard tower provided a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding woods. At the bottom of the property, a gate marked
WHITES ONLY
stood sentry. Busts of Hitler and swastika flags decorated the halls, and crosses were burned in an open field.
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The limited size of the acreage prevented the congress from including paramilitary training on the grounds, like those at Christian-Patriots Defense League fests. Other differences separated Aryan Nations from kindred operations during this period. No cultic leaders took root here, for example. And these meets tended to attract a more exclusive set with national socialist sympathies, hardened cadres at the center of the movement. They withstood years of public opposition and several waves of arrests and prosecutions, as Aryan Nations chief Richard Butler continued holding congresses and attracting new recruits.

Butler lived with his devoted wife, Betty, in a modest cabin on the grounds, which he owned personally. Tall, with tightly combed dirty gray hair, he had worked as an aircraft engineer in Southern California before retiring to northern Idaho in 1973, about the same time Ellison relocated to the Ozarks and Millar established Elohim City. Slightly older than Carto, Butler exhibited few business or entrepreneurial skills. He
was a doctrinaire advocate of Christian Identity theology whose belabored speech patterns kept him from artfully articulating his ideas. In fact, he could be either erect or stiff, depending on your point of view. But his devotion to the cause was solid and unmovable, and some followers were obviously attracted to his stern demeanor.

During the early 1980s Butler’s compound was the most elaborate administrative movement complex outside Liberty Lobby’s offices in Washington, D.C., but none of its arms stretched toward the political mainstream. Here was a vanguardist outfit with a small offset press that churned out a continual supply of booklets, newsletters, and leaflets. A couple of volunteers usually worked in the office, and several stayed on the premises, either in the bunkhouse or in their own trailers. The campground itself did not accommodate more than a half dozen full-time inhabitants, but several dozen others lived in surrounding communities and came over for church services, Bible studies, or meetings. Often, young runaways, men who had left their wives, or wandering activists stopped in the bunkhouse for a couple of days or weeks, worked around the grounds, and either moved on or stayed nearby to be close to “headquarters.” Virtually none of the Aryans meddled directly in the community life of the surrounding towns.

Although Butler set the rules by which the compound operated, he was rarely directly involved in its administrative affairs, such as literature sales or correspondence.
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At any given moment, Aryan Nations’ fortunes actually depended on the skills and practices of a revolving door of unpaid personnel, rather than on Butler’s personal abilities. He was clever (and militant) enough, however, to give his blessing to whatever new initiatives looked promising.

To the outside world, Butler was a public symbol. His use of the term “Zionist Occupied Government” to describe federal authorities caught the media’s attention. Newspaper articles, plays, and movies all focused on his vulgar national socialist beliefs and Hitler worship. Inside the closed world of the movement, Butler served mostly a titular role, brought out for ceremonial events such as cross burnings, marches, and christening of new Aryan warriors. He left the strategic leadership questions to other people.

The Idaho compound remained an open sewer of violence from its first moments of operation until it was finally closed down in 2001. And for most of the 1980s, its significance multiplied as it became a nodal point for Klan factions, small Hitlerite sects, and so-called Christian patriot groups, enabling the creation of a common language across several organizational lines. Some groups would have more sway at one time or the other. And the Nehemiah Township charter signed in 1982 descended
from the ideas of the group known as the Posse Comitatus, whose influence was particularly strong in those first years.
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Posse Comitatus means “power of the county” in Latin, and the organization has been misunderstood by outsiders almost from the beginning. Commentators described it variously as a tax protest organization, an antigovernment vigilante group, or a ragtag collection of anti–Federal Reserve farmers. In 1982 it was, in fact, all of those things and none of them. Even its founding figure was long in doubt. FBI memorandums listed the founder as Henry Beach, a pre–World War Two Hitler sympathizer from Portland, Oregon, a fiction promulgated by Beach himself. The actual founder, however, was a retired army colonel living in Mariposa, California. Steeped in the anti-Semitic tenets of Christian Identity, William Potter Gale started the group in 1971.
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The Posse extended the Christian Identity doctrine into a complex theory of constitutional government based on the notion that the United States is not a democracy but a Christian republic, lawfully governed by so-called Christian common law rather than legislative statutes and court decisions. Posse propagandists argued that the country’s governing institutions had been usurped by the “anti-Christ Jewry” and a bloody struggle was needed to set things white.
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In the 1970s, during the same years that David Duke re-created the Ku Klux Klan, Posse activists refused to file income tax returns and argued that the Federal Reserve money system was unconstitutional. They disregarded government environmental regulations, convened alternative “lawful” bodies such as grand juries and courts, and formed barter associations to do business.

At one point during the mid-seventies Posse members filed organizational charters at their county courthouses, each listing ten white Christian men who, they believed, constituted the sheriff’s posse. The charters staked a claim that the Posse was a lawful party to county government. Most court clerks simply filed the charters away and ignored them. These charters were the first in a long line of pseudolegal court documents, such as liens and common law court judgments, that Posse types used to build their movement and to trouble their opponents.
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Although Richard Butler and the others signed the Nehemiah Township documents in Idaho, and a Posse leader from Wisconsin, James Wickstrom, and a group in Shawano County had declared their homestead a “township” and off-limits to government authorities, the center
of Posse Comitatus activity had already shifted to the Farm Belt Midwest.
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There an acute economic and social crisis gripped agriculture. The farm-based economy and the particular type of rural life that it nurtured had been in chronic decline since the late nineteenth century, leading to a well-documented outpouring of population, white and black, from the countryside into the cities. The multiple causes included the widespread mechanization of agriculture that followed electrification and the market-driven tendency toward economies of scale. The boom-bust of the business cycle usually hit rural economies first, before spreading to industry and finance. The small towns of the Great Plains Midwest, like cotton-producing villages in the Deep South, had been drying up over several generations. And as the twentieth century progressed, the growth of industry occurred in large metropolitan centers. The problems in the farm economy during the early 1980s, however, constituted a unique period of economic, social, and personal crisis.
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The difficulties began with the price farmers received for their commodities, which often fell below their cost of production. And since family farmers typically borrowed money every spring for seed, fertilizer, and living expenses during the growing season, add to that the extraordinarily high interest rates of the period. Many farmers were caught in a cost-price squeeze that forced them out of business and off the land they had lived on. Between 1982 and 1985 the market value of farm acreage fell by an astonishing $146 billion, an amount equal to the combined assets of IBM, General Electric, Dow Chemical, and several other major corporations at that time.
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The drop in land value, which farmers routinely used to secure credit, paralleled a crisis in agricultural banking. As the value of loan collateral fell below the face amounts of the loans to family farmers, government lending agencies and private banks alike foreclosed in an attempt to stanch their losses. In a vicious cycle, one round of foreclosures put even more land on an already glutted market, lowering the land value again, and setting off another round of foreclosures with seemingly no end in sight. Approximately 625,000 family farm operations were lost between 1981 and 1988.
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These were not the large corporate-style agribusinesses typical of fruit and vegetable production in California and Florida, but smaller farms, producing commodity grains or beef or pork, and with few, if any, hired hands. For every four farms lost in the Midwest, one business on the nearby town square closed down also. The toll on individual families was harder to calculate, but we know community mental health agencies and suicide hotlines were overtaxed. While this problem began in the last years of
President Jimmy Carter’s term, the Reagan administration’s policies of tight credit and high interest rates exacerbated the situation.
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Family farmers searched wildly for answers to their problems. The first signs of revolt showed when the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) brought tens of thousands of farmers to Washington, D.C., in 1979 to protest farm policy. They organized a tractorcade that snarled up traffic around Capitol Hill and became a symbol of farmers’ newfound militancy. Born outside the structures of existing organizations, such as the National Farmers Union, the AAM exhibited the freewheeling style of militance and ideological diversity of a truly spontaneous mass movement. Among the group that founded the AAM, several embraced one type of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory or another, and some members adopted ideas promoted by
The Spotlight
tabloid to explain their distress. The Posse-influenced farmers pointed their fingers at the Federal Reserve System. But others did not, trying instead to find a stronger voice for lobbying Congress and state legislatures. Eventually a formal split occurred within the American Agriculture Movement. Daniel Levitas describes this multisided social struggle in
The Terrorist Next Door
, which remains the definitive book on the farm crisis and the Posse Comitatus.
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In 1982 the initiative in the rural Midwest still rested with vanguardists such as Wickstrom, who began advertising himself in periodicals widely read by farmers. After several speaking tours through small towns, Wickstrom developed grassroots followers who bought his Christian Identity lecture tapes, read his
Posse Noose Report
newsletter, and started forming Posses of their own. He even published a special pamphlet for farmers that repeated all the standard anti-Semitic slanders but added an explicit invocation to violence against Jews.

Gale joined Wickstrom in this crusade, and taped “sermons” by the two Posse leaders were regularly broadcast on a Dodge City, Kansas, radio station in 1982.
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That same year Gale and Wickstrom organized a paramilitary training session on a farm near Weskan, Kansas, just across the border from Colorado. It was advertised as an “Ecological Seminar,” and fifty-five participants registered and paid a fee (one hundred dollars for men, fifty for women, and thirty-five for children) to attend. Gale divided them into four groups, and for three days they attended sessions on killer teams, knife fighting, usable poisons, and explosives. Several personalities highly visible in farmers’ protest organizations trained with weapons; they included activists from the American Agriculture Movement, as well as individuals from an ad hoc group calling itself the Farmers
Liberation Army.
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Several Weskan attendees later organized their own bomb-making sessions, without either Wickstrom or Gale, and a couple of them gained prominence in the 1990s as militia and common law court activists.
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