WHILE THE CURRENT farm crisis has sparked a resurgence of progressive, democratic populism at the grassroots, those same desperate circumstances have also left many farm people susceptible to the simplistic appeal of right-wing extremists. While the Reagan administration seems to tell farmers that they are to blame for their own plight, the Far Right blames farm troubles on a far-flung conspiracy and offers a violent catharsis for the widespread frustration in rural America.
James Ridgeway has studied the rise of neo-fascist groups in the farm belt and has reported extensively on their activities in his weekly column in the Village Voice. Here he looks at some of the more prominent extremist groups and examines their political and religious roots, which reach back to the similar crisis during the Great Depression of the 1930s. --The Editors
For most of the last decade, the political debate in the United States has taken place on the Right, with the Reagan revolution standing as the most enduring testament to a revived conservatism. In this climate of fresh and audacious discussion, one of the most interesting and powerful strands has sprung up on the Far Right, among the racialist, so-called White Resistance.
The White Resistance embraces different factions of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. The best known groups include the Aryan Nations and its offshoot, The Order, whose members are either dead or in jail after a string of murders and robberies across the West, and the Posse Comitatus, a small racialist underground that is active in the farm belt. Of the two the Posse rose to truly mythic proportions largely because of the circumstances surrounding the farm crisis. The Posse is probably a small group in terms of numbers (a few thousand members at most), but in the political vacuum of the Midwest its ideas caught on.
In the troubled world of the modern farm, the Republican and Democratic parties are abstractions, often viewed by the Far Right as part of an overall conspiracy of the Federal Reserve System and the Jewish international bankers with their ties to Moscow. It is a world where Ronald Reagan is seen by many as a pathetic pawn of the Eastern bankers and George Bush an active agent of the Trilateral Commission, and where the ultra-right Liberty Lobby's Spotlight is the Wall Street Journal of many rural kitchens. It is a world where the candidates of Lyndon LaRouche are serious contenders and win grudging admiration from the political pros.
Most of all, it is a world where hope often comes from the Right--the side that offers simple answers, tells farmers they need not be helpless victims, and encourages rebellion. The Far Right organization that has achieved the most enduring impression in this regard is the Posse Comitatus, the starkly racist, strict constitutionalists who oppose income taxes and are vehement in their detestation of the Federal Reserve.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF the Posse is largely emblematic. By 1984 its symbolism increasingly pervaded mainstream politics across the farm belt. For some frustrated farmers, Posse is a symbol of resistance against the spreading tyranny of the state, manifest these days by banks taking over farms. It's a symbol of the patriots, of the "Sovereigns" who, to maintain their freedom, have become outlaws in their own country.
Posse is a little like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s--a loose network with influence far beyond its actual membership. Different local groups do different things. Some are into Armageddon, some into creating survival zones in preparation for the coming Soviet attack. Others are into pro se--learning how to represent themselves in the courts and helping farmers make a stand against foreclosure. Still others are into the white underground.
If you're Posse, you drop out of the state. As a Sovereign you don't need a driver's license. You find out how to get rid of your birth certificate and marriage license. You don't have a bank account, and you don't pay taxes. You keep your money in silver, the common man's metal. You barter. Posse groups steal.
You've got a semi-automatic mini-114 weapon, and you know how to quickly convert it to fully automatic. the countryside along with supplies of food and water. Every weekend you go into the wilderness and practice survival.
Posse is anarchist. The ultimate goal is to get rid of the state, to rear a new generation that can't be traced: children with no birth certificates, who don't go to school, who grow up as true Sovereigns under God and the Constitution.
The idea of Posse is supercharged with religion. Christian fundamentalism has many followers in the farm belt, and pre-millennialism has taken on new immediacy both because of the economic crisis and because of its popularizing by television preachers who have made the notion of the end times both immediate and highly political. President Reagan himself has spoken on more than one occasion about the remarkable coincidence between biblical prophecy and events in the Middle East.
If you believe what you read in the Bible--or at least what they say the Bible says--then you act. Time is drawing short. You are in God's army. For those drawn to Posse and other extremist groups, the ideas of Armageddon that come across the television from ministers and politicians are further heightened by the teachings of Christian Identity theology, which provides a theological base to racialism.
In Christian Identity theology, white Christians are the true "Israelites" of the Old Testament and are, therefore, God's chosen people, contrary to traditional Christian beliefs which assign this role to the Jews. The 10 lost tribes of Israel are the real predecessors of Nordic, British, and American whites, while modern-day Jews are descendants of a historically separate kingdom of Judah. Rendered into modern political terms, the United States is God's promised land, and modern Israel is a hoax.
In its British setting, Christian Identity theory is starkly anti-Semitic. The American Identity theologians have come up with an additional racist twist, the "two-seed" theory. This holds that the non-white races are "pre-Adamic," that is, before God created Adam and Eve, God created the subhuman non-whites and sent them to live outside the Garden of Eden. It was a little like a bad first draft.
Meanwhile, Eve was implanted with two seeds. From Adam's seed sprang Abel and the white race. From the seed of the serpent Satan came the lazy, wicked Cain.You've got several thousand rounds of ammunition cached in Angered, God threw Adam, Eve, and the serpent out of the Garden of Eden and decreed eternal racial conflict. Cain killed Abel, then ran off into the jungle to join the pre-Adamic non-whites. Hence, Christian Identity theology provides a religious basis for racism and anti-Semitism, as well as an ideological rationale for violence against minorities.
While Christian Identity theology is usually dismissed as an aberrant strain of Christianity, the belief that the lost tribes of Israel found their way through northern Europe to America is widely held, most notably by the followers of the late evangelist Herbert Armstrong. Armstrong's followers don't preach racism, but one can learn about the progress of the lost tribes from any one of their Sunday television programs or their popular magazine, the Plain Truth.
IF CHRISTIAN IDENTITY theory provides a shared religious background for many on the Far Right, the modern political origins go back more than 50 years. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful political force, running entire townships in the Midwest and bringing out 40,000 people in a 1925 Washington, D.C. demonstration against immigration. Its membership then totaled five million, compared with 10,000 today.
By the 1930s the Klan had given way to the fascists. Millions listened to Fr. Charles Coughlin, a Catholic radio preacher in Michigan, and his vitriolic broadcasts. Thugs from his Christian Crusade roamed New York City's Times Square and took over subway cars, looking for any opportunity to beat up Jews.
Once referred to as "the most dangerous man in America," William Dudley Pelley organized Silver Shirt storm troopers in the early 1930s. Arguing that "the time has come for an American Hitler and a pogrom," he ran for president in 1936 on the Christian Party ticket.
In Kansas fascist fundamentalism took hold in the form of the Rev. Gerald B. Winrod, who gained a large and militant following across the Midwest. His popular monthly magazine, Defender, argued that "Nazism and Fascism are patriotic and nationalistic." When Winrod tried to run for the Senate, a Unitarian minister, L.M. Birkhead, wrote a powerful book called Keep Fascism Out of Kansas, exposing Winrod's fascist sympathies and causing him to lose the race. Still Winrod drew 54,000 votes, a substantial number in Kansas in those days.
Among the most important figures on the Far Right--indeed the link between the Far Right of the '30s and the White Resistance of today--was Gerald L.K. Smith, founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, which supported Mussolini and Hitler. Smith grew up in Wisconsin and became a Disciples of Christ minister at the age of 18. In 1933 he was among the first to join the Silver Shirts and, in one letter, wrote Pelley that he was heading toward St. Louis, Missouri, "with a uniformed squad of young men composing what I believe will be the first Silver Shirt storm troop in America."
When he landed a job at First Christian Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, the theme of his preaching had changed from storm troopers to rural radicalism. He next came out for Huey Long, the populist Louisiana governor, who soon hired him as an organizer for the "Share Our Wealth" campaign, Long's scheme to decentralize wealth in the United States.
Smith traveled across Louisiana, speaking to more than one million people in 1934. It was thrilling stuff, as T. Harry Williams recounts in his biography, Huey Long: " 'Let's pull down these huge piles of gold until there shall be a real job,' Smith would cry, 'not a little old sow-belly, black-eyed pea job but a real spending money, beefsteak and gravey, Chevrolet, Ford in the garage, new suit, Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ, red, white and blue job for every man!'"
When Long was assassinated, Smith made an unsuccessful bid for power in Louisiana and then went north where he sought to join Fr. Coughlin. He attempted to organize the Committee of One Million, claiming it would combine the best features of the Coughlin and Long machines in a "nationalist front against Communism."
Smith's right-hand man in the Christian Nationalist Crusade was Wesley Swift, who also was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. While the pro-fascist movement of the '30s was in disgrace during World War II, Swift nonetheless made radio broadcasts in which he declared, "All Jews must be destroyed."
After Smith's death, Swift got to know William Potter Gale, who had served with Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific theater. Gale set up his own Identity church in Mariposa, California, organized a paramilitary outfit called the California Rangers, and in the mid-1970s became a leader of the Posse Comitatus. Through Gale, Swift was introduced to Richard Butler, an aircraft parts manufacturer who went on to create the Aryan Nations at Hayden Lake, Idaho.
By the 1980s the Aryan Nations was playing a major role in the resurgent Far Right, which comprised different neo-Nazi and Klan groups in a revolutionary movement. Last year the government arrested members of the Order, an Aryan Nations offshoot, on charges of armed robbery, counterfeiting, and murder. Bob Mathews, its founder, was killed in a shoot-out with FBI agents at Whidby Island, Washington, in late 1984, and the other members of the group either were convicted or pled guilty. They received sentences of up to 100 years in prison.
Mathews' dream was to establish a white bastion or homeland in the Northwest. That goal remains unchanged, although today members of the White Resistance, which includes various Klan and neo-Nazi groups, eschew violence and instead have dedicated themselves to creating a white "sanctuary" in the Northwest by outbreeding their enemies. By encouraging white women of good Aryan stock to have from five to 10 children each, the leadership hopes that in the harsh, demanding climate of the northern mountains a race of Norse supermen once again can rise to dominance.
THE IDEAS OF the Far Right are often dismissed as aberrations held by a small band of kooks or attacked by the Left as a form of right-wing "populism." Actually the ideas on the Far Right find scant basis in the populist movement of the 1880s, whose politics today would be considered of a socialist stripe. The roots of the Far Right lie elsewhere.
The anti-Semitism of the Posse and Klan were employed most effectively in recent history by Henry Ford, who imported the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and popularized them through his car dealerships. Last winter, at the right-wing farm meetings in the Midwest, copies of the "Protocols" and various subsidiary tracts were again selling like hot cakes. The appealing anarchism of the Posse and the call for a return to anti-bank, populist roots have been mounted in the Midwest by small-town Republicans who two decades ago were keen enthusiasts of Sen. Joe McCarthy.
While the organizations and individuals on the Far Right have become ingrown, their leaders imprisoned, and the organizations themselves threatened by legal crackdowns, some of their ideas have passed into mainstream politics. The historical enmity toward aliens remains a prominent plank of standard conservative politics. Protectionism, revived and nurtured in the general rigor mortis of the industrial trades union movement, can now boast any number of jingoistic opportunists on Capitol Hill. Right-wing tax protest is a widely embraced phenomenon. The world of the Far Right does not stand still.
James Ridgeway was author of the weekly political column "The Moving Target" for the Village Voice when this article appeared.
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