Blood and Politics (39 page)

At first the identities of punks, white power skins, and antiracist skins were mixed together. They attended the same music shows and often read the same zines (cut-and-paste, do-it-yourself periodicals usually produced at the local copy shop). One early skinhead conflated all three identities in a letter to a music tabloid. “I feel it’s about time we skins/Nazi skins stood up and told it like it is,” he wrote. “I agree with sporting swastikas as a symbol of Blitzkrieg style revolution. That’s why I joined the punk movement . . . it presented me with an aggressive, angry, stomping, fighting mad type of movement.” This elemental rage and confusion was oft-repeated.
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Gradually, differences in music, dress style, and attitudes toward violence separated the nationalistic skins from the nihilistic punks. Each developed its own zines. American white power skins listened to tapes and records of British bands, but they had not yet birthed their own homegrown American bands. So for a while in the mid-1980s, punks
and both types of skins shared music events. In Denver, for example, one notorious skinhead fought repeatedly in the mosh pit of area punk clubs until he left the city. When he returned, he started a small-time business distributing British neo-Nazi skinhead music and paraphernalia. (He eventually became a regional organizer for a Klan group.)
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A crew in San Francisco, one of the very first, followed a similar trajectory into the white phantasm. They began as punks in the same city that had once produced beatniks and flower children. Gradually this crew rejected the mores, values, and style of their punk brethren. At the same time, they began adopting dress styles and tattoos from British white power skinheads and listening to British bands. They also started battling punks for control of the music scene. Sometimes the punks struck back, and one punk band, Dead Kennedys, had a national following with its song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”
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Unlike the British skins they imitated, however, most American skinheads invented their “working-class” character. One early study found that most were “high school dropouts from middle-class, politically conservative, suburban backgrounds.”
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One prominent young woman in a San Francisco group was from a wealthy family. She adopted punk styles while attending elite art schools before dropping out and joining the skinhead scene.
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Hardly the story of angry unemployed working-class youth so often told to explain the skinhead phenomenon in the United States.

What skinheads did provide one another was intense comradeship and a set of family-like relationships. They often lived communally, eagerly defended one another, and physically attacked outside groups. By the late 1980s the line between punks and skinheads had been firmly demarcated. One white power skinhead group in Cincinnati, obviously annoyed at the confused identities, distributed a crude handwritten leaflet: “We are
not
idiotic punk rockers and do not wish to be associated with such left-wing scum . . . We are the exact opposite in ideals . . . We are part of a world-wide white nationalist movement of youth.”
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This internationalist version of white nationalism was bred into the subculture by its origins as an imitation of British styles, music, and political sensibilities. At Pulaski the appeal to neo-Confederate nationalism or Pete Peters’s theology was less powerful than the thudding magnetism of electric guitars and growling calls for blood and soil. Although a small segment of skins did embrace Christian Identity doctrine, most found their religious icons in Norse mythology, Viking history, and runic symbols. While Peters and his Identity kinsmen regarded America as a special promised land, for skinheads it was just one more landmass, like Europe, on which the white gene pool reproduced.

Even if William Pierce was paying scant attention to skinheads at that time, his own dogma closely paralleled theirs, particularly regarding Christian Identity’s claims to historical accuracy. In
Hunter
, his second novel after
The Turner Diaries
, published in 1989, Pierce has one of his mouthpiece characters remark on Christian Identity’s claim that the biblical people Israel were Aryans: “They have this completely nutty version of history, which no one who’s paid attention in his high school history class can believe.”
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If Pierce had been out in the cow pasture that night, he might have whooped and hollered Pete Peters off the stage along with the rest.

But Pierce was not at Pulaski in 1989 or any other venue where he might rub shoulders with the undisciplined minions that made up the vanguardists’ new rank and file. He spent the year ensconced in his West Virginia camp, installing a new computer system and preparing the text of
Hunter
for publication. He noticed that “more and more people [had] become receptive to the message” and were buying his magazines and books. But more sales did not translate easily into new recruits. “It’s still very difficult to find more good people for our team,” he complained. “The fact is that we need more people involved in our work, and we need more money to support those people.”
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Apparently, Pierce did not draw the simple conclusion that sitting on the side of a mountain and writing a novel would not build the kind of cadre organization he wanted.

Pierce and National Alliance made one attempt in those years to reach out to mainstream white people, a stockholders’ initiative like that used by consumer groups.
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In 1986, the same year he had moved his headquarters from a Washington, D.C., suburb to West Virginia, National Alliance bought one hundred shares of AT&T stock. A year later it submitted a proposal against affirmative action for a vote by stockholders. AT&T’s management responded by not submitting the proposal to a vote, but a Securities and Exchange Commission ruling placed it on the agenda for an April 1988 vote. Amid great controversy and protests, the resolution was voted down. National Alliance resubmitted a similar resolution for the 1989 meeting, but that too was voted down. As skinheads were marching around Pulaski’s town square, Pierce’s cadres were preparing still another resolution for the 1990 AT&T stockholders’ meeting. Whatever stockholders actually thought of affirmative action, it was unlikely they would vote for a resolution sponsored by an outfit advocating a white revolution.

Why would Pierce and National Alliance bother with such a misguided scheme? A
National Vanguard
magazine article describing the resolution process reminded readers that they believed “equality is a
despicable goal.” Not much news in that statement. So an additional rationale was invoked: “The aim is to take the offensive against the enemies of White America, to show what can be done with the weapons at hand, and to inspire others to take them up and join the fight.”
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Pierce soon abandoned this experiment with stockholders’ resolutions. At that point, mass organizing—even among the rough-and-tumble skinheads, much less ordinary white stockholders—was still beyond the National Alliance’s ken. A few years later, however, that changed.

If William Pierce dressed once or twice in Willis Carto’s more mainstream costume, then Carto did the reverse, putting on Pierce’s vanguardist clothes for an occasion or two. Carto made a stab at promoting the skin scene in the 1980s, when his
Spotlight
tabloid published a three-page photo and text spread glorifying skinheads. “They live by a macho creed of two-fisted values such as personal courage and fighting skills,” it gushed.

“[They] represent a total rejection of the system by a still small, but possibly pace-setting, element of today’s youth . . . In increasing numbers they are turning to the struggle to replace this order with one that will truly care about their race and their nation . . . given the toughness, determination and fearlessness of the skinheads, they are certainly prepared to do their part to bring a new social order to America,”
The Spotlight
marveled. The spread had been written and photographed by Robert Hoy, a middle-aged American who had published a magazine spread of photographs on British skinheads.
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(In a most ironic twist, Hoy later was on the receiving end of that macho creed, much to his regret.)

At that time Carto did not follow Hoy’s heroic photo display with any initiatives aimed specifically at recruiting the young subculturalists to his enterprises. The established British far right racist parties had already tried and failed to turn violence-prone dance hall drunkards into semirespectable electioneering Tory look-alikes. Americans like Carto were to have had even less success than their British counterparts.

There was one established leader, however, who had a loyal following among skinheads as the decade ended: Tom Metzger. More than anyone else, Metzger churned the skinheads’ raw power into usable ideological steam. Metzger had long ago forsaken the electioneering model he had adopted immediately after leaving Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He now sneered at both Duke and Carto. Like Pierce, he had little more than contempt for ordinary white people, chained as they were to their television sets and conservative values. Unlike Pierce, however, Metzger
exalted spontaneity over discipline, small “wolf packs” over large organizations, and street action in metropolitan centers over mountainside retreats. And his prescient reading of white youth subcultures and freewheeling approach transformed him into the skinheads’ godfather. “White revolutionaries have no dogmas,” he proclaimed.
²⁷

Compared with Carto’s weekly
Spotlight
or Pierce’s glossy
National Vanguard
magazine, the tabloid Metzger published looked like an amateur effort. But the cartoons, polemics, and sloganeering were the envy of comrades such as Louis Beam. “You are producing the kind of publication others have only dreamed about,” Beam wrote to Metzger.
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During the early 1980s Metzger’s closest associates had pushed him toward the skinheads. Perhaps most important among them was Wyatt Kaldenberg, a former New Leftist who claimed to have campaigned for Tom Hayden and had once joined a Marxist sect.
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The physically imposing Kaldenberg was particularly attuned to marginal subcultures. He worried that veteran white nationalists would not recognize new opportunities in unexpected places. He lamented what he regarded as a lost chance for the Aryan cause, when the early punk movement in Southern California, he claimed, had been dominated by “Nazis.” Punk clubs, Kaldenberg wrote, had been a “great recruiting ground for the young White Racists.” But the opportunity was missed because “Jews dominate the music industry and now they control the punk scene.” The emergence of skinheads, Kaldenberg argued, was “a present given to us from the English [
sic
] National Front.” It was a subculture “sweeping the nation and . . . is our greatest in road into Aryan Youth.”
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He proposed providing white power bands with places to play and other support.

Metzger took the hint. In 1983, six years before Aryan Nations held its Pulaski event, Metzger promoted British skinhead music.
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He sponsored skinheads on his community access cable television program and defended the young racists on national news programs. His tabloid became a forum for skins, publishing their letters and articles, advertising their organizations, and promoting their events. Odinist graphics and skin-style cartoons dominated the tabloid’s design. The middle-aged former Klansman who had once won a congressional primary election disappeared under a blanket of white power rock music and Viking tattoos. “Ancient barbaric qualities are just what our effete, overcivilized and self-abasing society needs,” his
WAR
tabloid cheered.
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In 1988, Metzger sponsored the first “Aryan Fest” with homegrown American bands in northeastern Oklahoma. More than a hundred skinheads from Minnesota to Texas turned up for a day of music and speeches. It was the first in a string of outdoor “Reich ’n Roll” concerts.
Stealing a page from the 1960s, Metzger even advertised one California gathering as an “Aryan Woodstock.”
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Tabloids of cartoons, daylong rock fests, and computer bulletin boards may have helped bring skins under Metzger’s wing, but taken altogether, these elements still could not change a small subculture into the most visible national symbol of white youth rebellion. Mainstream television talk shows did that. From the well-regarded
The Oprah Winfrey Show
to a dozen other lesser lights, white power skinheads took advantage of the electronic soapbox provided them. Their TV hosts were unprepared for the skins’ willingness to flout the rules of television etiquette, and the shows usually turned into verbal race riots.

Finally, on November 4, 1988, skinhead TV turned violent on
The Geraldo Rivera Show
. Rivera opened his program with the proclamation that “sunlight was the best disinfectant” for hatred. On the television stage he arrayed Tom Metzger’s son John and two skinheads against a rabbi and a black man. When a melee ensued, chairs were thrown and Wyatt Kaldenberg charged from the audience and broke Rivera’s nose.

The fight was replayed on the nightly news, and the following morning daily newspapers across the country printed pictures and long stories. One of the syndicated comics ran a strip on Rivera’s nose. Overnight, for millions of young white people, defiance of convention and authority became visually intertwined with white power skinheads. It was as if Geraldo Rivera had paid for and distributed forty million copies of an
Aryan Youth Movement
tabloid.
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Contrary to Rivera’s initial claims, nothing was disinfected.

The Metzgers went home and claimed victory. “Thousands of inquiries and millions of viewers now recognize a White separatist movement exists,” they crowed.
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Even William Pierce sent word of his approval. “I just saw someone who looks a lot like your son John punch out Roy Innis on the Geraldo Show on the NBC Evening News,” Pierce wrote in a letter to the elder Metzger. “Tom Brokaw identified him only as a ‘hatemonger,’ but I thought I recognized the face. If I was right, please give my warmest congratulations to your son.”
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