Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

by Kathleen Belew

A holistic study of the white power movement reveals a startling and unexpected origin: the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target, declaring war against the federal government in 1983.7

With the 1983 turn to revolution, the movement adopted a new strategy, “leaderless resistance.”

At the height of its mainstream appeal in the mid-1990s, the militia movement counted some five million members and sympathizers, according to one watchdog analyst. That number certainly represents the upper bound of possibility, and it is likely that the white-power-identified cohort of militia members and sympathizers was significantly smaller. However, five million places the militia movement in line with the largest surge of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership peaked in 1924 at four million.

While white power activists held worldviews that aligned or overlapped with those of mainstream conservatism—including opposition to immigration, welfare, abortion, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights—the movement was not dedicated to political conservatism aimed at preserving an existing way of life, or even to the reestablishment of bygone racial or gender hierarchies. Instead, it emphasized a radical future that could be achieved only through revolution.

In the wake of military failure in Southeast Asia, masculinity provided an ideological frame for the New Right, challenged antiwar sentiment, and idealized bygone and invented familial and gender orders throughout American society.

White power should be recognized as something broader than the Klan, encompassing a wider range of ideologies and operating simultaneously in public and underground.

While white power featured a diversity of views and an array of competing leaders, all corners of the movement were inspired by feelings of defeat, emasculation, and betrayal after the Vietnam War and by social and economic changes that seemed to threaten and victimize white men.

Also essential in binding the movement together was the 1974 white utopian novel The Turner Diaries, which channeled and responded to the nascent white power narrative of the Vietnam War.45 The novel provided a blueprint for action, tracing the structure of leaderless resistance and modeling, in fiction, the guerrilla tactics of assassination and bombing that activists would embrace for the next two decades. Activists distributed and quoted from the book frequently. It was more than a guide, though. The popularity of The Turner Diaries made it a touchstone, a point of connection among movement members and sympathizers that brought them together in common cause.

The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the enduring impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about war itself. War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.

Ku Klux Klan membership surges have aligned more neatly with the aftermath of war than with poverty, anti-immigration sentiment, or populism, to name a few common explanations.

Beam knew that wartime experiences had shaped Klan violence throughout history, and he regularly invoked these lessons of the past.15 When Confederate veterans of the Civil War founded the first Ku Klux Klan in 1866, they sought to relive “the excitement of army scenes.”

The Klan’s second rise followed the national consolidation of a Civil War narrative that valorized the violence of the first Klan, capitalized on the high-profile lynching of Leo Frank, and then drew in returning veterans from World War I.18 It reached its largest membership in 1924, at some four million nationwide.

The third Klan resurgence, which trailed the return of veterans from combat in World War II and Korea, mobilized in opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

ON NOVEMBER 3, 1979, a caravan of neo-Nazis and Klansmen fired upon a communist-organized “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five protestors died—four white men and one black woman—and many more were injured. Fourteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis faced murder, conspiracy, and felony riot charges. Although three news cameras captured the identity and actions of the Klan and neo-Nazi shooters, all-white juries acquitted the defendants in state and federal criminal trials. A civil suit returned only partial justice. The Greensboro confrontation heralded a paramilitary white power movement mobilized for violence, and also revealed a legal system broadly unprepared to convict its perpetrators.

For instance, the slogan “Kill ’Em All, Let God Sort ’Em Out” appeared regularly in the paramilitary magazine Soldier of Fortune. Founded in 1975 by Special Forces veteran Robert K. Brown, Soldier of Fortune had 35,000 subscribers, 150,000 newsstand sales, and an estimated 300,000 casual readers in the mid-1980s.

The Iran Contra scandal revealed rising paramilitarism in the nation itself. Hawks in the Reagan administration saw the executive as the head of a Cold War military chain of command rather than as one branch of a three-part government limited by checks and balances. The CIA, newly incorporated into Reagan’s cabinet, now functioned as part of the executive. The administration also further expanded army Special Forces and navy SEAL units, and militarized SWAT teams and other civilian police units as well as the National Guard by providing these agencies with military weapons and training.

The racist utopian novel The Turner Diaries, perhaps the most prominent white power text, was one that served this function. It first appeared in serial form in Attack!, the newspaper of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance, in 1974. Group leader and author William Pierce published it in paperback under the pseudonym of Andrew Macdonald in 1978.37 Over the next twenty years, The Turner Diaries sold some 500,000 copies, gaining tremendous popularity both in the white power movement and around the mercenary soldier circuit.

White power pro-natalism and the symbolic importance of women’s reproduction became distilled in Order member David Lane’s slogan, penned in prison and widely circulated within the movement: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” This reproductive mandate, which quickly became known as “Fourteen Words,” was linked to the sexual availability of white women.