A BRIEF HISTORY OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN NORTH AMERICA
[From the NSWPP Manual, Second Edition, April 1998]
The National Socialist period in Germany is too well known to require discussion here. At the end of this manual, you will find a recommended reading list and a list of sources for study materials which will provide you with a wealth of information and detail about our world view, our European past, and other aspects of the racialstruggle world-wide. It is your responsibility as a Party member to familiarize yourself with our Movement's past, with the Third Reich, and with the development of the National Socialist world view in Europe.
This section of the handbook deals with the transfer of the National Socialist ideal to the North American continent. The term "American Nazi Party" conjures up visions of Commander Rockwell, but in fact there was an extensive National Socialist movement in America prior to the Second World War.
The primary NS group in the U. S. during the 1930s was the German American Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn. The Bund staged a number of highly publicized rallies and marches and other events but actually wielded very little power or influence. In part this was because it was too closely associated with the German government in the public's mind, but also because the Bund was primarily comprised of German immigrants or Americans of recent German descent, and so achieved strength only in those areas of the country which at that time had large German populations, such as New York, New Jersey, the upper Midwest in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, and a few other areas. The Bund was outlawed in 1941 by the Roosevelt régime, Fritz Kuhn and other leaders were interned, and the organization disappeared from the American scene.
Of more interest to us today were several native American proto-Fascist or proto-National Socialist movements. A group called the Silver Shirts was formed in Asheville, North Carolina on January 31st, 1933, the day after the Führer Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. The founder was an American named William Dudley Pelley, who was inspired by the success of the Movement in Germany and hoped to emulate Hitler's accomplishments in this country. His organization flowered briefly, faltered, then disappeared, and Pelley began an aimless odyssey from tiny splinter group to tiny splinter group, prefiguring a pattern which has continued in right-wing politics until this day.
A more serious effort was a clandestine movement called the Black Legion, formed in 1935 by a man named Parker Sage. An underground patriotic revolutionary group organized on military lines, at one stage the Legion is believed to have numbered as many as 25,000 members, although one hysterical left-wing writer credited the organization with 100,000. The Black Legion functioned mainly in the central and upper Midwest, and in some Midwestern states it outstripped the Second Era Ku Klux Klan at its height in numbers and influence. Like the Klan, the Black Legion engaged in guerrilla-style attacks against Communist union agitators, blacks, boot- leggers, and other elements deemed to be "anti-social".
Unable to obtain genuine evidence of any criminal wrongdoing, Federal authorities engaged in a crackdown in late 1937 through fabricated conspiracy charges which more or less broke up the organization. In the wake of the Black Legion, Parker Sage founded the National Workers' League in Detroit in 1938.The N.W.L. was heavily influenced by the American National Socialist political scientist Lawrence Dennis. The N.W.L. was a labor union which sought to organize the White working class in a struggle against capitalism and the destructive Judaic economic system of usury and interest slavery. Dennis took his cue from such German National Socialist theoreticians as Dietrich Eckart, Walther Darré and Gottfried Feder, but also from the American populist tradition of the I 890s, the Grange, the pre-Marxian socialists, and the old Populist Party.
This brief, fascinating, and now virtually unremembered Populist period in American political history produced brilliant leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs (in his early pre-Marx days), and Tom Watson of Georgia. There were a series of Populist governors in the South like James Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, "Pitchfork Ben" Tiliman in South Carolina, and Charles Brantley Aycock in North Carolina who made the famous statement, "There shall be no progress in the South for either race until the Negro is removed permanently from the political process."
In 1940, Lawrence Dennis himself wrote, "Democratic and capitalist leadership in America has just one real peacetime concern, to stabilize stagnation. Thus, they hope to avert revolution. The values of democracy and capitalism are no longer credible because their mechanics are no longer workable. To defend a democracy controlled by an alien elite means to die not for your future but for theirs.... a new spirit of Folk conciousness is leading us out ofstagnation along the path of revolution. The wise men and social scientists of the democracies have not understood this. Adolf Hitler has understood this."
The National Workers' League published a weekly paper called Nationalist Newsletter up until it was shut down in 1943 by bogus indictments against Dennis and others,which resulted in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. The evidence against the defendants was so palpably absurd that all were acquitted. (The government staged a repeat performance in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1988, which also failed to gain a single conviction.) Lawrence Dennis remains a little-known but important pioneer in our racial cause, his works worthy of further study, but they are today virtually unobtainable except for the occasional find in obscure used book stores and occasional library reference sections.
"EVERY MAN A KING, BUT NO ONE WEARS THE CROWN..."
The closest we've ever gotten to a genuine Folkish revolutionary leader in this country was Huey Pierce Long (1894-1935), governor of Louisiana and later a United States Senator. Long is a problematic but fascinating figure to all who study his life and career.
Known as "the Kingfish", Long was unquestionably an egotist and a power-hungry personality who ruthlessly trampled over everyone who got in his way. He was one of the most skillful machine politicians in American history, a master manipulator who became one of the greatest practitioners of the corrupt democratic system of patronage, bribery,corruption, extortion, and deception. On several occasions he called out the Louisiana National Guard to intimidate his political opponents, (who were rather in need of intimidating, if the truth be known.) When he left for the Senate in 1932, Huey hand-picked his own successor as governor, a flunky named 0. K. Allen who was so feckless that a legend arose that he once signed a leaf which blew in through the window and landed on his desk in the State House.
But even Huey Long's worst enemies have never denied that the Kingfish manifested throughout his whole life a profound love, respect and concern for the White Southern working class, the factory workers and sharecroppers and manual laborers who in that day as in this bore the brunt of taxation, conscription in time of war, cynical political exploitation, and arrogant patronizing discrimination by the wealthier classes in the South who from the time of slavery had used the black presence as a source of cheap labor to keep the White workers' wages low, and as a potential threat to keep the poor Whites in line. For the poor Whites to rock the boat, to break with the Bourbons of the planter class, always risked weakening or damaging the social and legal mechanisms of control, with the ever-present danger that the blacks might be turned loose to rob and rape and kill, (as indeed occurred in the 1950s, and which situation prevails to this day in the South and throughout the rest of the country).
But in Huey Long, the White workers no longer had a boss, but a true friend in a position of power. The wealthy liberal elite, the New World Order of the era never forgave Long for it, and eventually they killed him. Long began his battle for White rights in the I 920s when he was elected to the relatively minor position of state Railroad Commissioner. By raising carriage rates for large corporations, notably the all-powerful Standard Oil, and by improving pay, benefits and conditions for the railroad workers Long incurred the anger of the power structure. Twice they tried unsuccessfully to indict Long and remove him from office, but being a skilled attorney as well as a politician, Huey beat them back.
Elected governor in 1928, Long provided widespread employment through road-building and swamp drainage projects. He further enraged the rich and powerful by providing free textbooks and lunches for all Louisiana school children, in those days a positively revolutionary concept, since many White working class children could not go to school because their parents could not afford to buy books. In the little bayou town of St. Martinsville, Long made one of the most famous addresses in American political history, the "Evangeline Speech", one of the most searing indictments of liberal democracy ever delivered by an American political leader. Long was speaking to a crowd of French Cajuns, the despised White minority of Louisiana whom the liberal journalists of that day (as well as this) patronized, mocked, and abused, and whom the wealthy upper class of that day (as well as this) generally considered to be "lower than niggers":
"...Here beneath this oak; Evangeline waited for her lover, who never came. It is a spot made immortal by Longfellow 's poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools you have waited for your children to have, which have never come? Where are the roads and highways that you send your money to build, which are now no nearer than before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and the disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but they lasted only through a single lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak; have lasted for generations. Give me the chance at last to dry the tears of those who still weep here1" (Long won the election by a landslide.)
As a U. S. Senator Long began to widen his appeal onto a nationwide level in preparation for a presidential bid against Franidin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. Huey built his own national organization through his books Every Man A King and My First 100 Days In The White House, and also through his "Share The Wealth Clubs", whose slogan was "Every man a king, but no one wears the crown."
Long advocated a highly revolutionary and populist program involving not just the restriction of capitalist excesses and better individual conditions for working people, but the actual redistribution of existing wealth, something only Adolf Hitler has ever been able to achieve without mass slaughter. Long's breathtakingly simple plan was to place a legal limit of one million dollars on annual income for individuals, and as well as a cap of ten million dollars on the individual net worth of any one American citizen. By 1930s standards,and even today, this is more than enough money to maintain an individual and his family in the most magnificent luxury, nor is there really any valid reason why any one person needs more income or wealth than this. But by advocating this idea, Long signed his own death warrant.
On the night of Sunday, September 8th, 1935, Huey Long was shot dead in the corridors of the Louisiana State House by a Jewish doctor named Carl Austin Weiss. The assassin was immediately himself gunned down by a Louisiana state police detective assigned to guard the Senator. Despite several half-hearted attempts by subsequent politically correct authors to prove that Weiss was innocent, a recent exhumation and autopsy on Long's body (1993) proved that the fatal bullet which killed Long did indeed come from Weiss's .32 automatic and not, as has been alleged, from the weapon of one of Long's bodyguards.
No credible motive has ever been unearthed as to why Weiss sat down and ate his Sunday dinner, played with the family dog, and then stuck a pistol in his pocket and went over the the state capital to kill a United States Senator. Born a Jew, Weiss converted to Catholicism and married into an upper-crust French Roman Catholic family. It has been lamely suggested that Weiss was upset at a insult to his father-in-law, a prominent judge, on the part of Senator Long, i.e. that the judge and hence Weiss's wife had Negroid blood in them, but no one has been able to come up with any documentary proof that any such allegation was ever made by Long or anyone else.
The most likely explanation is that the established power structure had decided that Huey Long must die, and Carl Weiss drew the short straw. It was common knowledge in Louisiana's elite circles that Standard Oil was plotting to kill Long and had allocated a large sum of money for that purpose. In Huey Long, White working people lost a leader who was arguably the only real friend they have had in any position of power during the past eighty years. To this day, the Whites of Louisiana have exhibited a stubborn rebellious streak, such as when they cast huge vote totals for David Duke in recent years. And to this day, any mention of Huey Long's name will bring thunderous cheers from any gathering of Louisiana working people
GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL
After the catastrophic defeat and destruction of National Socialist Germany in 1945, there were a small band of activists who kept the NS spirit alive in this country throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. These included men like James Madole of the New York-based National Renaissance Party; Conde McGinley, who edited and published the newspaper Common Sense, and the group of activists who formed the Free Ezra Pound Committee, which included such later lights as J. B. Stoner and Dr. Edward R. Fields. Also politically active in the 1950s was the brilliant if somewhat erratic philosopher and author Francis Parker Yockey, who wrote Impenum, one of the major works of racial nationalism, and whose mysterious death in police custody in San Francisco in 1960 has always looked suspiciously like murder.
But post-war American National Socialism owes its existence to one man: U. S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. One of the few genuinely heroic figures the American racial nationalist movement has produced, Rockwell formed the American Nazi Party in 1958 after years of floundering around the traditional "right wing" and becoming disillusioned with everything he found there.
Rockwell's method was simple: a supporter had given Rockwell a large Swastika wall banner taken from National Socialist Germany during the war, and Rockwell pulled side the curtains of a picture window in his home on Williams Street in Arlington, Virginia to reveal the flag with its ancient Aryan symbol to the passing world. That night a gang of drunken hoodlums pulled up outside and hurled bricks and bottles through the pcture window, the first in a long series of acts of persecution and terrorism which have been directed against American National Socialists.
In the coming years Rockwell would be arrested, jailed, beaten, shot at, and confmed in a mental institution because he dared to stand up for his constitutional rights as an American citizen to express dissenting viewpoints. Commander Rockwell established for the American Nazi Party the first Four Phase Program. This differs considerably from the present NSWPP program, but for a political plan developed in 1958 it showed remarkable prescience, and had Commander Rockwell lived and been better served by those who claimed to be his friends and supporters, it is possible that his program would have taken the Party much farther than anyone thought possible.
Phase One was the most spectacular and in many respects the most misunderstood phase, a misunderstanding which to some degree persists to this day. It involved a series of flamboyant and sometimes downright bizarre publicity stunts such as dressing Rockwell himself and small numbers of supporters in quasi-Third Reich style uniforms and then picketing the White House; trying to conduct chaotic open-air rallies on the Washington Monument grounds; starting a riot when Rockwell tried to speak in Times Square in New York to a mob of thousands of screaming, frothing Jews; dressing up in gorilla costumes and riding around New York posing as the "Lower Volta delegation to the United Nations; donning gorilla suits again and running through the 1964 Democratic convention yelling "Ah's de Mississippi delegation and ah demands mah seat! "; riding through the South in a Swastika-spangled "Hate Bus", etc.
When you hear Movement people today speak of "Phase One tactics", it is this kind of rambunctious and amusing but not really productive activity which is meant. The difference between Rockwell's tactics and the tactics of the present day Party will be explained in the appropriate section of this manual, but briefly stated, Rockwell was faced in the 1950s and early 1960s with an urgent need to break through the blackout of all pro-White activity, the media boycott of all pro-White viewpoints, at any cost-even the cost of making the Party look ridiculous through blatant publicity stunts.
It is sometimes difficult for older comrades to remember, and of course younger comrades never knew, that as bad as the left-wing liberal bias in the news media is today, in Rockwell's day it was even worse.Whereas today the technological developments such as the Internet, computer bulletin boards, CB radios, fax machines,cable access etc. have to a certain degree undermined the power structure's grip on the nation's communications, in those days there were only three networks and the major newspapers were even more completely Jewish-owned and controlled than today. The entire communications industry marched in grim lockstep, the Great Society ruled, the State of Israel was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and could do no wrong, blacks were a noble and sensitive race of persecuted paragons, and anybody who suggested differently simply was not allowed to be heard. It was essential that Rockwell smash this paper curtain of silence.
However, it must not be thought that George Lincoln Rockwell was nothing but street theater. He was also a brilliant writer and organizer. In 1960 he wrote his seminal work In Hoc Signo Vinces, the first National Socialist polemic in the English language since 1945; in 1962 he co-founded the World Union of National Socialists and co-authored the Cotswolds Declaration, the fundamental statement of the National Socialist world view in post-war times; his books This Time The World and White Power are today just as fascinating and instructive reading as they were when they were written.
Rockwell was also a riveting and charismatic speaker, as can be heard to this day in recordings of his famous addresses at Brown University and taped excerpts from his interviews, many of which are available from various Movement sources. Today collectors pay fabulous sums for original copies of his magazine, The Rockwell Report, and his "Boat Ticket Back to Africa" is the single most popular racial nationalist item ever created by any right-wing or racialist group; millions of copies have been printed and distributed down the years.
By 1966 the ANP was at last beginning to break through to large numbers of White people. In that year the Party's Chicago unit organized massive White resistance to a physical invasion, massively backed by organized liberalism, which Martin Luther King spearheaded into the various ethnic neighborhoods on the city's South Side. Mobs of young men wearing White Power T-shirts and Swastika armbands battled against the NAACP monkoids and their police protectors. The resistance was so fierce that it caused King to remark that "he would rather lead ten marches into Selma, Alabama than one march into Gage Park in Chicago."
In early 1967 Rockwell obtained major funding from a cartel of wealthy right-wing businessmen, including the Hunt brothers in Texas, and he used this money to print and publish the book White Power and also the newspaper of the same name. In a historic staff conference held in Arlington in June of that year, Commander Rockwell formally changed the name of the organization to the National Socialist White People's Party.
Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered in Arlington on Friday, August 25th, 1967, under circumstances which have never been satisfactorily cleared up, but which point to at least peripheral involvement on the part of the man who succeeded him as leader of the Party. Rockwell's death was unquestionably the result of a conspiracy.
While it is likely that the individual convicted of the murder, a former Party member named John Patler, was indeed the trigger man who shot down the Commander in an Arlington shopping center, what has never been satisfactorily explained was precisely how Patler knew when and where Rockwell would be, in order to intercept and ambush his victim. It is clear from any objective examination of the case that Patler had at least one accomplice inside the old Party headquarters, called "Hatemonger Hill". Patter was convicted after only the most cursory police investigation, received the lightest possible prison sentence allowable under Virginia law, and was released after spending only a few years in comfortable, minimum-security facilities.
The accomplice who betrayed Rockwell has never been publicly identified, but those of us who revere Rockwell's memory have very definite ideas anent that particular subject. The mills of Adolf Hitler grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine. Enough.
THE LONG TWILIGHT
Every political movement has low points. The years which followed the death of George Lincoln Rockwell was such a low point in the history of American National Socialism. The NSWPP continued to exist on paper for a number of years, nor should it be imagined that these years were completely barren of worthwhile events.
Dr. William L. Pierce, a close associate of Commander Rockwell and former officer of the ANP, published several issues of the theoretical journal National Socialist World; generally considered the best post-1945 NS ideological publication, reprints are still circulated in the Movement to this day. The Party played a minor part in the Watergate affair when it was revealed by then NSWPP Lieutenant Joe Tommasi that the unit members had been hired by the Nixon re-election committee to re-register Wallace voters and thus get Wallace's American Party knocked off the ballot in California. In the last hurrah of the old Rockwell spirit, a wild attack on a left-wing rally at the 1972 Republican convention in Miami added to the Party's roll of daring exploits when 24 Stormtroopers seized the plafform and prevented Jane Fonda from speaking for over an hour. The Party also lent practical help to the Irish-American community in South Boston during the 1974 school busing crisis.
In 1978 the National Socialist Party of America, a breakaway faction of the old NSWPP comprising the more dedicated members who had tired of the corruption and incompetence of the Arlington leadership, orchestrated and carried to a successful conclusion the famous "Operation Skokie". This resulted in worldwide publicity and eventually a United States Supreme Court decision which specifically protected National Socialist insignia and speech under the First Amendment.
The present NSWPP General Secretary, Harold A. Covington, received 34% of the vote in the 1978 Republican primary for North Carolina State Senate. In 1979 N.S.P.A. members were involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the Greensboro incident where a mob of Communist Workers' Party members attacked a White motorcade on a public street in Greensboro, North Carolina. A gun battle broke out in which five of the Reds were slain, yet all the Klan and NS defendants were eventually acquitted. In 1980, Covington polled 43% of the vote in the 1980 Republican primary for the office of North Carolina Attorney General.
During the 1980s the tragic and heroic saga of the Order took place, the first armed insurrection against the United States government since 1865, which culminated in the death of Robert Mathews on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. The Order were heavily influenced by National Socialism and the works of Commander Rockwell, as well as the Christian Identity religious message and the Northwest independence idea.
The National Socialist White People's Party was reconstituted in April of 1994 in response to a growing demand in America's White racial nationalist movement for "the real McCoy". Thousands of young White people across the country have banded together in small activity groups centered around the National Socialist ideology, and are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the various Swastika substitutes and watered-down, pseudo-NS imitations going the rounds. In addition, it is now clear that the time for mere survival has ended and the time to resume progress towards White revolution has arrived. The Movement today clearly cries out for a return to discipline, method, organization, and purpose in our racial struggle. The Party has stepped forward to fill that need.
