Blood and Politics (22 page)

Consider then the actual character of the antielitism projected by Weems. Like others of his ilk, he considered the government of white elites to be on the same side as the black poor, and he opposed them both. His so-called populism was just as surely arrayed against the black poor as it was against the white elites. He didn’t call for measures such as stronger trade unions, an increased minimum wage, or even parity prices in agriculture. Further, specifically agrarian or rural concerns were not even mentioned that day in Arkansas. As a matter of style, Carto’s Populist Party was a picture of white-sheeted racism in a Grant Wood frame of pitchfork Americana.

Four months after Weems’s prayer day in Arkansas, on August 17–19, 1984, the Populist Party held its founding convention in Nashville. A facade of unity stretched over the six hundred “delegates” from forty-two states and dozens of organizations. Anyone who registered at the door and paid thirty-five dollars to be a party member could be a delegate and vote. It was a plaid shirt and polyester suit group, much like at Mount Nebo. Approximately two-thirds were aged fifty or older, and almost 50 percent were women. A noticeable minority of farmers was present. Almost half the delegates came from Tennessee, although Florida, California, and Illinois had sizable contingents.
¹³

If the party was to succeed at all, it depended on various small groups working smoothly together. But they all had come to Nashville with different
agendas. One wanted to repeal the income tax; another opposed the separation of church and state; still another wanted an investigation of Israel’s mistaken attack on the USS
Liberty
spy ship in the Mediterranean in 1967. Mini parties such as the Conservative Party in Kansas and the Constitution Party in Wisconsin had to agree to subordinate their own egos to the larger superego.
¹⁴

The most important organization affiliated with Carto’s newest enterprise was the American Independent Party in California, led by William Shearer. His party had something Liberty Lobby didn’t: ballot status in California and the largest reservoir of potential candidates for local office—a prerequisite for any party hoping to win votes.
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Carto and Shearer agreed to work together. “The ideological merger is a major step,” Weems concluded in a
Spotlight
article publicizing the party. To effect this “merger,” a deal was cut. Shearer became the “dean” of the party’s so-called school of politics, and his wife, Eileen, was given the post of national campaign coordinator. Carto became the school’s “assistant dean,” not its top spot. But he remained in control of those things that really mattered, like the money. Liberty Lobby also controlled the party’s propaganda, through
The Spotlight
.
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The conventioneers nominated for president Bob Richards, an Olympic decathlon champion featured on the Wheaties breakfast cereal box. Maureen Salaman, a bright-eyed, quick-witted mother of two grown children from California, was nominated for vice president. Richards ultimately felt pinched and uncomfortable in his role, like a man wearing someone else’s shoes. Salaman seemed to fit right in, on the other hand, although she was one of the few women in leadership.
¹⁷

“We’re up against the most evil and powerful conspiracy the world has ever known,” Salaman said during her acceptance speech. She was the president of the National Health Federation, a foe of the American Medical Association and government regulation of cancer treatment. Her book
Nutrition: The Cancer Answer
and five years as a radio personality seemed to make her an attractive candidate.
¹⁸
Salaman’s nomination may have been inspired by the fact that she represented alternative health activists. A significant percentage of
The Spotlight
’s paid advertising promoted unusual medical treatments, vitamins, and whole foods. The same merchandise, usually available at shops in upscale urban neighborhoods, also sold well at survivalist expos and Christian patriot meets.

Despite Salaman’s credentials, some of the delegates grumbled about nominating a woman for vice president. Keith Shive, the farmer at the Gordon Kahl rally in Kansas, received some unexpected votes for the vice presidential nomination.
¹⁹
Carto and Shearer both backed the health
foodist rather than the farmer. Although
The Spotlight
had covered farm-related events since the first tractorcade protests, the party leadership at Nashville missed the initial indication that a program of opposition to farm foreclosures might win votes. Nevertheless, during a resolutions session farmers sponsored an unanticipated motion for an immediate moratorium on farm foreclosures. It passed unanimously.
²⁰

The Populist Party’s election campaign failed before it got started. Recruiting a personality with unproven bona fides, such as Olympic champion Bob Richards, might have given the party more visibility and new adherents. But that inexperience also made him politically unreliable. Almost from the first, Richards talked positively about Jews in Israel and how he had personally witnessed the furnaces of the Holocaust. Both points put him at odds with Carto and Liberty Lobby, which controlled the party’s money as well as its major vehicles for publicity. Richards tried to compensate by opening a campaign bank account that he alone controlled. But he raised little money, and after the convention
The Spotlight
dropped Bob Richards’s name from its pages faster than an Old Bolshevik purged from the history books by Stalin.
²¹

The candidate or the party or one of its state affiliates managed to get on the ballot in only fourteen states and win 66,168 votes in November 1984. The party’s treasurer reported that the campaign spent “just under one million dollars” and left a $280,000 debt, according to William Shearer, Carto’s ostensible partner in this enterprise.
²²
The paltry showing at the polls was only exceeded by constant bickering by party officials over the debt and other factional differences, including charges made by anti-Klan groups that the party was a vehicle for promoting racism and anti-Semitism.
²³

William Shearer used his California newsletter to defend the party: “The Populist stands . . . include no attacks on any ethnic group, nor could such an attack properly be made. Both Jews and non-Jews can be found in the ranks of international bankers, pornographers and usurious lenders, just as both Jews and non-Jews may be found among victimized borrowers, farmers and crusaders for decency.”
²⁴
Carto reprinted Shearer’s defense in
The Spotlight
, but the issue never went away. Fallen-away Klansmen and defrocked national socialists remained firmly ensconced among the national and local leadership. Later Shearer felt compelled to add that “there are always those who will try to misuse a political party as a vehicle for some prejudice or passion.”
²⁵
The internal bickering continued, and before the 1988 election season Shearer
pulled his American Independent Party apparatus back out of the Populist Party.
²⁶

Despite the presence of Carto, Weems, and other well-known white supremacists at the center of this effort, most of the movement’s hardcore cadres could not be convinced to join. A man like Aryan Nations führer Richard Butler would not climb down off his compound and vote. “A political party, even though called ‘Populist,’ will never remove our bondage, nor prevent our race’s slaughter to gratify the blood lust of the eternal, destroying Jew,” Butler wrote. “Politics as we know it today is nothing more than Jewish duplicity and deception, bemusing the befuddled goy ‘sheep’ while they are being sheared.”
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Similarly, common law activists, like those at Cheney Lake who memorialized Gordon Kahl, were unlikely even to register to vote after rescinding their driver’s licenses and other “contracts” with the state. The new party’s inability to unify the existing pool of white supremacists was compounded by its failure to develop new voters in the one place it could have possibly won a following, among the debt-ridden farmers of the Midwest.

Dozens of small-time anti-Semites like Keith Shive had joined the Populist Party and pushed it to include farm foreclosures in the platform. By 1986 a Nebraska farmer had become the party’s “national vice-chairman for agriculture,” a post with little pomp and even less circumstance.
²⁸

The Iowa state party filed a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve, and for only thirty-five dollars farmers could add their names as plaintiffs.
²⁹
Like the common law liens, this lawsuit went nowhere. But it did recruit a few genuine farmers to the party’s ranks. One of them, Johnny Vogel, ran unsuccessfully for Iowa’s state senate.
³⁰

The Populist Party’s efforts to fish in the sea of farmers’ discontent suffered from competition that came from every corner. In addition to the Posse Comitatus mentioned earlier, William Pierce’s National Alliance had sent out a team of pamphleteers to entice any true Aryans parading in the American Agriculture Movement’s first tractorcades in D.C. Even Louis Beam and Robert Mathews had put a line in this stream. Numbers of scam artists sold phony loan schemes, bogus common law lien kits, and land patents along with anti-Semitic and racist propaganda tracts. One particularly popular pamphlet, authored by a Christian Identity preacher, argued that Hitler had solved the problems of debt and economic crisis by removing the “international bankers” from Germany.
³¹
Each of these snake oil salesmen developed a following
just large enough to take energy and money away from campaigns for the ballot.

While the Populist Party’s electioneering could not capture all of this activity, Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
did speak in broad enough terms to win a significant subscriber base in the Midwest. One East Coast reporter even suggested that the tabloid was read by farm revolt leaders in the same fashion that investment bankers read
The Wall Street Journal
.
³²
And the years of propaganda about Jewish banking conspiracies had a cumulative effect on community attitudes that showed up in carefully constructed public opinion surveys.

A 1986 Louis Harris poll of rural Iowa and Nebraska residents found 42 percent of respondents agreeing with the statement “Jews should stop complaining about what happened to them in Nazi Germany.” Forty-three percent agreed that “when it comes to choosing between people and money, Jews will choose money.” Most significant, 27 percent agreed that “farmers have always been exploited by international Jewish bankers.” Harris’s conclusion: this was a mass phenomenon, even if it wasn’t massive.
³³

Despite these numbers, farmers were not inherently anti-Semitic or immune to alternatives to both the Populist Party and its Posse-type competitors. Progressive-minded farmers ultimately drove the white supremacists and anti-Semites out of their movement. During the mid-1980s, liberal nonprofit agencies and state farm-church coalitions entered the fray. They remembered fondly the Roosevelt-era farm programs that protected the commodity prices that farmers received at the grain elevators. A new foundation, Farm Aid, took center stage in 1985, as Willie Nelson and other musicians raised funds through high-profile benefit concerts, funneling money to progressive and mainstream grassroots organizations, many of them springing up as an alternative to the dead-end politics of the Posse. Farmers joined with union members and civil rights activists to protest foreclosure sales on the steps of county courthouses. They lobbied state legislatures as well as Congress. In Missouri, progressive farmers held a 145-day protest at the doors of a county office of the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) and succeeded in having a particularly onerous supervisor removed.

In the end, organizations with liberal policy agendas like Farm Aid prevailed. Significant blocs of (white) farmers supported the Reverend Jesse Jackson during his run in the Democratic primaries. Farmers won an important policy change with the Farm Credit Act of 1987. A multi-state class action lawsuit against the Farmers Home Administration resulted in a stay in government foreclosures that same year.
³⁴
Many of the remaining farm families were able to restructure their debts, and the
crisis receded a bit. In its place chronic decline returned to much of the rural Midwest, and a new wave of corporatization threatened to overturn what remained of family-size agriculture. Invoking “Christian common law” and charging after mythical Jewish conspiracies had not saved a single family farm. After 1988 the followers of these theories dissipated as a force in family farm politics. And the Populist Party had missed its main chance to win a mass constituency.

Nevertheless, both the Populist Party and its Posse Comitatus competition did leave a lasting imprint on the white supremacist movement. In the mid-1990s, Posse types—although no longer attached to a genuine mass farm movement—became the seedbed for a revival of Christian patriot militias. And the Populist Party carved out its own distinctive niche, serving as a point of intersection for second-tier leaders and local activists. The party helped restart David Duke’s career. And it identified issues that were later picked up by Pat Buchanan. While the Populists sometimes suffered from their association with Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
, the party managed to add a distinct Americanist counterbalance to the European focus then dominant at the Institute for Historical Review.

February 15, 1986.
At a sunny venue in Southern California, the tone of the Institute for Historical Review’s seventh conference fluctutated between that of a dank European
Bierstube
and a mint and magnolias southern plantation. An ethnic Croatian lectured on the link between “B’nai B’rith and Yugoslavia’s Tito.” A German national blamed World War Two on Churchill and Roosevelt. A Romanian-born medical doctor living in Chicago, Alexander Ronnett, extolled the virtues of the fascist legionary movement in prewar Romania while distinguishing it from Hitler’s National Socialism. The institute’s George Orwell Free Speech Award went to a Canadian attorney whose moment of glory rested on defending Ernst Zündel, a German Canadian propagandist indicted for “falsifying history.”
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