Blood and Politics (74 page)

One of the most telling events occurred in 1979, when the Memphis council sponsored an appearance by the British national socialist John Tyndall, who was then traveling the United States much as he did again in 1991. Apparently, Tyndall so enthralled his Memphis audience that the council’s tabloid, now called
Citizens Informer
, gave two-thirds of a page to speech excerpts. The editors capitalized all of what was obviously meant to be Tyndall’s thunderous conclusion: “AND THE WHITE MAN WILL ONCE AGAIN MARCH VICTORIOUSLY THROUGH THE JUNGLES AND DESERTS OF THE WORLD AND STAMP HIS WILL AND HIS GENIUS ON EVERY CORNER OF THE GLOBE.” Tyndall’s unveiled call for white world supremacy evoked “enthusiastic clapping,” according to the report on the meeting.

The
Citizens Informer
tabloid, published from St. Louis rather than Mississippi, occupied a unique place at the time. By providing affiliated
local councils with news of one another’s activities, it kept the organization together during its years of relative inactivity. In October 1980, the month before Reagan was elected president, it counted nineteen local and state councils on its list. Of those, three were state or regional in nature: Arkansas, the “Kentuckiana” area around Louisville, and southern Michigan. Three local councils had Kentucky addresses, three were in Illinois, one was in Florida, and one uniquely active council was in Greater Memphis. Six chapters spanned the state of Missouri. In Mississippi, the organization’s birthplace, only one was a chapter formally associated with the St. Louis publication, but local councils remained active elsewhere in the state. Two regional “coordinators” kept local groups moving. Bill Lord, Jr., operated out of Mississippi. Gordon Baum practiced personal injury law in St. Louis. Both doubled as Citizens Councils officials.

Finally, when the Citizens Councils of America gave way to the association calling itself the Council of Conservative Citizens, both Bill Lord and Gordon Baum helped birth the new formation.
¹⁰
The full transition to the Council of Conservative Citizens occurred over a five- to seven-year period, beginning in March 1985 with the creation of two related nonprofit corporations in Missouri and ending in 1990 with the final dissolution of the old Citizens Councils of America. Baum became the chief executive. The
Citizens Informer
tabloid, still published in St. Louis by a third corporation, became the house organ of this reassembled amalgam of organizational faces.
¹¹
And the new Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) inherited the dead organization’s mailing list and membership.
¹²
The conversion occurred unevenly as local groups of the old Citizens Councils changed their names and formally affiliated with the Council of Conservative Citizens. In the new CofCC’s hometown, St. Louis, for example, local affiliates still referred to themselves as Citizens Councils for some time after the formation of the new group. Slowly, one local organization at a time switched its self-reference from the old to the new. The Manatee County, Florida, group was typical in this regard. In 1990 it still referred to itself as a Citizens Council. By the following year, however, it had adopted the new name and formally become a Council of Conservative Citizens group. In the same fashion, long-standing Citizens Councils leaders—at the local level, as well as regional and national figures—became part of this growing new structure.

While the old Citizens Councils had been simply holding on, the new Council of Conservative Citizens began a period of rapid growth in the early 1990s. Rather than simply market its tabloid to new subscribers, as
Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
did, or look for a few good men to turn into revolutionary cadres, as National Alliance did, it focused existing organizational resources on developing new local councils as a matter of policy.
¹³
Like any self-respecting Rotary or Kiwanis club, councils gave their best activists plaques and awards, as if supporting South African apartheid were a form of public service. They elected local boards of directors, held regular meetings, and created an internal organizational life that socialized and educated their members—without drawing them into the small cultlike groups that salted the Christian patriot movement in the Midwest and West. By building a stable foundation, rather than sending funds to a central headquarters, they enabled future growth and leadership development to occur organically.

Further adding to the CofCC’s momentum, they maintained a non-sectarian policy toward other like-minded efforts. Members joined their local Republican women’s clubs, promoted local antitax groups, and helped elect school board members. They also continued supporting and sustaining all-white private schools, particularly in Mississippi, much as Citizens Councils had in the past. And councils adopted a set of issues that paid significant organizational dividends, such as preservation of the Confederate flag and memorials. As a result, the CofCC could reasonably point to itself as uniquely embodying the unity of white nationalism and traditional southern conservatism. Sam Francis was among the first to extol this virtue. “By supporting and uniting the right to keep and bear arms, the right to life, tax reform, crime control . . .” he wrote, “the CCC actually works towards building a real national and unified coalition.”
¹⁴

For those weary of the competitive battles fought by Willis Carto and others, pragmatic collaboration was a safe port in factional seas. Further adding to its strength, CofCC members entwined themselves in the Republican Party’s Buchananite wing like kudzu on an Arkansas hillside. The council’s emphasis on working at the Republicans’ grass roots had handsomely rewarded a relatively small investment. Witness the prominence of Mississippi State Senator Mike Gunn.
¹⁵
Like Sam Francis, Gunn had once served on the staff of North Carolina Senator John East. In 1990, Gunn won election to Mississippi’s house of representatives, and in 1992 he took a seat in the state senate. Gunn proposed legislation requiring women receiving welfare to have a semipermanent contraceptive, Norplant, embedded in their arms. The measure failed. Nevertheless, the American Legislative Exchange Council named Gunn its “outstanding legislator of the year” at its 1993 annual meeting.
¹⁶
Gunn maintained a multifaceted relationship with other white nationalists. In addition to serving on the Council of Conservative Citizens’ national
board of directors, he ran a direct mail business. He did work for candidate David Duke in 1990 and 1991 and was paid ninety-five hundred dollars for designing a fund-raising solicitation.
¹⁷
When Pat Buchanan came to Mississippi in April 1995 to receive the support of Governor Kirk Fordice, Buchanan made a side trip to the Ross Barnett Reservoir, to speak at a fund-raiser for Mike Gunn. “Mike is a good friend of ours,” Bay Buchanan told the local newspaper.

Sam Francis commented on these types of efforts in
The Washington Times
: “The result of the mainstream conservative strategy has been to dilute and disperse right-wing efforts . . . but since its main goal was fund-raising, who cared anyway? In contrast, the CCC goal is to make each cause work with and support the others, thus multiplying their impact on lawmakers and creating an authentic synthesis of the values and interests of Middle America.”
¹⁸

As a result of these policies and the growth they engendered, the Council of Conservative Citizens began to absorb activists from white nationalism’s further corners. Most were from the second and third tiers of movement leadership. Their names, personalities, and immediate past activist histories, however, added to the CofCC’s growing importance inside the movement. From David Duke’s Republican campaigns in Louisiana emerged Hope Lubrano and Kenny Knight, among others. Knight brought his experience as Duke’s campaign manager, and Lubrano had been a key organizer who later worked for Buchanan in the presidential primaries. From the Populist Party came A. J. Barker, the North Carolina siding salesman. Less than a year after joining, Barker became chair of the CofCC North Carolina affiliate. Also from the Populist Party’s ranks came William Carter, a chiropractor who became the council’s South Carolina state chair. As activists from a variety of groups enlisted, so too did a few well-placed cadres from William Pierce’s National Alliance, who took up positions of influence and authority. Conspicuously absent in this growing formation was Liberty Lobby, and
The Spotlight
continued to ignore the council.
¹⁹

Despite the presence of anti-Semites in its ranks, the CofCC shied away from explicit organizational expressions of anti-Semitism. The absence of conspiracy mongering and anti-Semitic “Jews run the world” rhetoric contributed to the CofCC’s expansion, keeping it from diving completely off the political margins. Conspiracy theories typically turned every mundane occurrence into a grand metaphysical battle between good and evil. By contrast, the CofCC developed a surehanded, down-to-earth analysis of events. And without a nasty cloud of anti-Jewish rhetoric steaming up its meeting rooms, the CofCC persona more closely resembled that of everyday nondoctrinaire racism. Simply put,
CofCC activists lived and talked and acted much like many other white conservatives opposed to “special rights” for people of color. This policy on anti-Semitism enabled the most significant addition to the council’s mix after 1994, as the leading figures of Jared Taylor’s
American Renaissance
enterprise joined up. Both Taylor and Sam Francis were enlisted to the
Citizens Informer
’s editorial advisory board, and several
Renaissance
contributors and conference speakers were invited to council meetings to make special presentations.

Taylor spoke at a gathering in Little Rock in April 1994 and then at a Georgia meeting alongside Sam Dickson and A. J. Barker that July. Again at council events honoring the Confederate dead, Taylor delivered his ideas on crime, the media, and flags. The council republished Taylor’s defense of Confederate symbols: “The reason why the Confederacy is under such violent attack today is that it is a symbol not only of the white culture that the ethnic saboteurs wish to destroy, but is also seen—rightly or wrongly—as a symbol of a white culture that refuses to apologize. What better way to attack white America than to insult the last remnant of a
proud
white America [emphasis in original].”
²⁰

The
American Renaissance
grouping added intellectual heft to the council’s grassroots activism, and over the next few years the two organizations became almost completely intermeshed. After
The Washington Times
threw Sam Francis out the window, his ties to the CofCC became even stronger.

September 29, 1995.
The Washington Times
published its last column by Samuel Francis, 868 words supporting an American soldier’s refusal to submit to the New World Order and wear a United Nations helmet while on military duty in the former Yugoslavia. At that moment the disintegration of the Balkan state threatened to spread even further, and UN troops stood between competing ethnic-based nationalities. Francis argued in his usual bad-boy America-first style against any involvement in the region including multilateral efforts such as peacekeeping.

Although the
Times
considered itself a bastion for responsible conservatives in the country’s capital, Francis’s irresponsible ultranationalism had never been punished at the paper. But another event that week led to his submitting his resignation upon request.
¹

Getting fired is usually not news. Excessive absenteeism is a frequent cause for young workers for whom getting out of bed on Monday morning is too difficult, and middle-aged moms risk losing their jobs when their children get sick. Highly paid fifty-five-year-old professionals often “retire” early, to be replaced by those younger and lower on the wage scale. Salespeople who don’t meet their quotas are routinely “let go.” Whether or not they pay union dues, factory hands unable to keep pace with an assembly line producing sixty widgets an hour get “sacked.” None of those above, however, would likely describe getting canned as “defenestration.” Nor would they be able to excoriate former bosses in two installments in
Chronicles
, a national magazine of cultural criticism.
²
Nor would the average widget worker believe that the unyielding dogmatism of neoconservatives was the unspoken force behind the pink slip. But Sam Francis did. And he was right on all counts, including his usage of a Latinate term for getting thrown out a window.

Francis had not been just any ordinary editorialist, he would be the first to tell you. In nine years at
The Washington Times
he had served in multiple capacities, including editorial page editor and “nationally syndicated staff columnist.” He had won awards more prestigious than any other received by a
Times
journalist. Despite his years of highly acclaimed service, he had been thrown out as if he were an obituary writer made redundant by a decline in the death rate.
³

The most proximate cause of Francis’s fall from conservative grace was a column he wrote attacking a Southern Baptist Convention’s declaration that slavery had been a sin for which it asked forgiveness. As a matter of history, the Southern Baptist Convention needed to address the question of slavery, inasmuch as it had first been organized in 1845 as part of the southern defense of the peculiar institution. According to Francis, however, “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.” In his defense, he argued, the apostle Paul had spoken in favor of “servants” obeying their “masters.” Only with the Enlightenment, he wrote, did “a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery” and the “poison of equality” seep into the “tissues of the West.”
⁴

As Francis carefully pointed out, he was not guilty of theologically justifying slavery. He had simply called his readers’ attention to the fact that the New Testament did not rule out slavery. And to buttress the point, he said that neither of his two immediate supervisors at
The Washington Times
had seen fit to pull the offending column before it ran or even make a preliminary editorial comment on its content. Nevertheless, the day after his column ran, Francis was summarily demoted in position and given a punitive cut in pay.