For
April 11
Excerpt
from Catherine McNicol Stock: Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American
Grain (Cornell University Press, 1996)
AT FIRST GLANCE, Randy and Vicki
Weaver's childhoods in Iowa and their subsequent married life in Idaho could
not have been more different. Although they had grown up amid the slowly
undulating midwestern prairie, as adults they gazed over the roughest mountain
terrain in the northwestern United States. Although they had once lived in
tightly knit farm communities, cruised Main Street on Saturday nights, and at-
tended churches and schools where folks had known one another for generations,
they settled in an isolated place, built a cabin out of ply- wood boards,
educated their three children at home, and sometimes did not see neighbors for
weeks at a time.' Most different of all, however, were the two political
environments the Weavers inhabited. Both Weavers, but Vicki in particular, had
flourished in the traditional heart- land of rural producer radicalism. Her
family had owned a large hog farm for more than a century. Vicki had learned to
bake, sew, and make home repairs even better than her mother. In the 1980s
Vicki's brother likely had supported increased government spending to curb the
farm crisis; her sister married a member of a rock-and-roll band. In the
mountains, however, the Weavers lived among people who believed that
conventional agrarian ways of life were doomed and conventional agrarian
politics irrelevant because Zionists already controlled the federal government
and were preparing to enslave all white Christian Americans. They converted to
Identity Christianity, a belief system popular among right-wing extremists. And
they definitely did not listen to rock and roll. In Iowa the Weavers had been
described as an 'all-American couple. " After their move to Idaho they
seemed, to most people, as far out of the American mainstream as any family
could be.
The
distance between Iowa and Idaho, between the politics of producerism and the
culture of vigilantism, between progressive and regressive ideologies, and
between the American left and right may seem large to us. But for the Weavers,
and many other Americans like them, it was short indeed. As a farm girl in
Iowa, Vicki Weaver had first be- come suspicious of the power of the federal
government when the Department of Transportation ordered a new highway to run
right through their farmhouse. Likewise, as a summer farm hand, Randy had first
learned to confront unjust authority when a local farmer had paid him less than
his older brothers to weed some fields. As children and teenagers, both Weavers
attended conservative Protestant churches where they heard admonitions about
the coming of the end of the world. Finally, as young parents living in Cedar
Falls, the Weavers en- countered the organizations and ideologies of the far
right. The more they heard and read the more ardently they believed that the
United States had come under the control of the enemy: Jews, communists,
atheists, homosexuals, perhaps even Satan himself. More than main- stream
preachers knew, more than even evangelical radio preachers of the New Right
would admit, the end of the world was near.'
In 1983 the Weavers loaded their three
children--Sara, Samuel, and Rachel--into a car and set out in search of a
mountaintop home where they could live simply and await Armageddon. Vicki's
parents, David and Jeane Jordison, and her sister, Julie, hoped that getting
'out in the woods" would help them 'return to reality. If anything,.however, the
Weavers' move served to strengthen and deepen their unconventional beliefs.
After a long journey, they settled high on Ruby Ridge, seven miles outside
Naples in Boundary County, Idaho, population 8,332. Boundary County was already
the home of the Aryan Nations, of the Order, and of cells of several other
"hate' organizations of our time. Soon the Weavers began discussing the
possibility of creating a white separatist nation in the Pacific Northwest, a
proposal backed by both the neo-Nazi and Klan groups. In 1988 Randy Weaver ran
for county sheriff, promising that he would enforce only the laws that peo- ple
endorsed; he won more than a quarter of the votes cast. Meanwhile he and his
family continued to prepare for the coming of the end of the world or, barring
that, the invasion by the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG). They armed
their children and made sure they could defend themselves when the day came.
It came faster than even they had
anticipated. After attending the Aryan Nations World Congress in the summer of
1986, Randy Weaver landed on a federal list of dangerous white separatists and
became the object of a sting operation. When he sold a shotgun that was
one-quarter inch shorter than allowed by law to an undercover agent of the Bu-
reau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, he was arrested. Even though he told
the agents, 'You'll never fool me again," he was released with- out bond.
Randy Weaver did not appear in court. 'Whether we live or whether we die,' he
and Vicki announced, 'we will not obey your law- less government." Randy
also purportedly warned that he would kill any official who tried to arrest
him. Thus for nearly eighteen months United States marshals surrounded the
cabin on Ruby Ridge while the Weavers lived on their food reserves, wild game,
garden produce, and gifts from more than fifty local supporters. As time
passed, neo-Nazis, survivalists, skinheads, and other militant extremists from
around the country gathered along the road leading to their home.
On Friday, August 21, 1992, the tense
stand-off was broken by gunfire. Thirteen-year-old Sam Weaver and Kevin Harris,
a family friend who had been living with the Weavers off and on for many years,
went outside with Sam's dog. The dog heard something in the bushes; the boy and
man followed, hoping they could flush out some game and augment the family's
dwindling supply of protein. Instead they came upon a group of five marshals
who had been ordered to scout out the area for a possible hostage-rescue-type
operation. Afraid that the dog would give him away, Marshal William Degan shot
it. Then Sam Weaver shot and killed Degan. The other marshals opened fire,
wound- ing Harris and killing Sam Weaver with a bullet to the back. His last
words as he ran back up the mountain were "I'm coming, Dad."
By
this point, the government's patience was spent. The FBI's elite Hostage Rescue
Team was brought in-with orders to shoot to kill. Al- together more than a
hundred FBI agents as well as Idaho national guardsmen and a variety of other
state and local officials, with cars, helicopters, and armored vehicles
gathered at Ruby Ridge. The crowds be- hind the barricades grew larger as well.
Some carried signs that read, 'Your home could be next' and 'Government
Lies/Patriot Dies." Others yelled, "Baby killer, baby killer.'
Several were arrested for illegal possession of firearms. All the while no one
knew that Vicki Weaver was also dead. The day after the initial shoot-out,
Randy and Sara had gone to an outbuilding (known as the birthing shed because
Vicki went there during menstruation and childbirth) to tend to his son's body.
He was shot and wounded. As he and Sara had run in terror back to the cabin,
Vicki had held the door open with one arm and cradled ten- month-old Elshiba in
the other. Suddenly a bullet struck her in the back of the head, and blood and
bone fragments flew through the air. For more than a week Vicki's corpse lay
under the kitchen table, wrapped in a plastic sheet, while the baby cried for
her mother to nurse her and the rest the family waited to be killed by the
government.'
Finally, on August 30, 1992, Weaver and Harris gave themselves up to
authorities and were indicted for the murder of William Degan. They had been
convinced to come out by James 'Bo" Gritz, a former Green Beret commander
and paramilitary specialist who had known Weaver in the army during the Vietnam
War. In the 1980s Gritz had purportedly served as the exemplar for Hollywood's
Rambo character. By the 1990s he had become a celebrity in the survivalist
right. "In the end it came down to Sara,' Gritz said later. 'She had this
fear that the govern- ment would not keep its part of the bargain [of safety
for the family]. She wept and wept. But we said the battle was in the courts
now." Gritz, like Weaver, believed that the initial sting had been illegal
and that the stand-off was proof of ZOG's devotion to killing white Christians
by whatever means necessary. When he left the compound, he gave his supporters
in the crowd a Nazi salute. "The time is now," one of them said.
"Let's take America back."
The tragic story of Randy and Vicki
Weaver will long be remembered as one of the most important events in the
history of the contemporary far right. Like the FBI engagement with David
Koresh and his followers in their compound in Waco, Texas, which ended in the
deaths of more than seventy of them on April 19, 1993, the Ruby Ridge incident
galvanized thousands of Americans who had distrusted the government but until
then had not believed that FBI agents might actually invade their homes or kill
their wives and children. Within two months of Vicki's death, Bo Gritz, Louis
Beam, the leader of one of the latest reincarnations of the KKK, and John Trochmann,
a Weaver friend, called a meeting at Estes Park, Colorado. There they announced
plans to establish a "leader- less resistance" to the government, in
particular, militia cells that would teach Americans how to prepare for the
assault of ZOG. By early April
1995
there were militias on guard in thirty-six states across America. As many as
fifteen thousand men trained, gathered arms, and distributed literature that
explained the international conspiracy and the constitutional right to bear
arms. Not all of these men lived as simply as the Weavers: by 1995 news about
Ruby Ridge, Waco, the militia movement-even recipes for homemade bombs and
other weapons-was available on the Internet."
Information about militias reached
two army buddies who also believed that the federal government was an enemy of
the American people. Timothy McVeigh had grown up in Lockport, New York, a
failing rust-belt town far removed from centers of political, economic, or
cultural influence. From a young age he had been fascinated with guns, military
paraphernalia, and warfare. At age eighteen he joined the army, excelled as a
soldier, and rose quickly through the ranks. His interest in guns was extreme
even among the other army men." But his ultimate military aspirations were
not to be fulfilled. Shortly after he completed his tour in the Gulf War,
McVeigh failed to qualify for a highly selective Special Forces unit and then
was relieved from duty al- together. Strangely, McVeigh did not seem to be as
upset about these events as his buddies thought he would be. As it turned out,
McVeigh was beginning to wonder whether the United States government should be
fought for or fought against. He was particularly worried after the passage of
the Brady bill, which required a ten-day waiting period for all gun purchases.
He allegedly feared that the bill was just the beginning of the government's
attempt to take all weapons from whites and restrict their ability to defend
themselves."
Terry
Nichols was of a like mind. Nichols's brother, James, was a farmer from Sanilac
County, Michigan, one of the most rural counties in the state. Terry, however,
never succeeded at much that he at- tempted. He was in his mid-thirtes when he
joined the army, where he quickly became popular with the younger recruits.
Meeting for the first time, McVeigh and Nichols developed an especially strong
friendship. They both believed that the government had become part of a larger
conspiracy to take away the freedoms of white Americans, in part by taking away
their guns. After his discharge, Nichols allegedly began to stockpile arms and
ammunition. He lived in Michigan for a time and reportedly looked into joining
a local militia. Both he and McVeigh started to read books and watch films that
depicted the armed resis- tance of white patriots. They were especially fond of
The Tumer Diaries, a novel that described in violent detail the recapture of the United
States by white Christian patriots and the annihilation of all minorities-in
one section of the novel by a huge truck-bomb blast. By 1995 they were
allegedly ready to take action: their reading, their own experiences, the
militia movement, passage of the Brady bill, the assaults on Ruby Ridge and
Waco told them that the government needed to be destroyed before it could
destroy them.
The
Weavers story (and by extension McVeigh's and Nichols's) also reminds as that
radicalism in rural America-however terrible it has become-is not easy to
understand within the boundaries of con- ventional political definition and
conventional understandings of the past. Some of the Weavers beliefs-that the
government was corrupt, unresponsive, and controlled by a greedy elite who
scorned the values of a simple freehold lifestyle--bound them to the rural
producer radicalism expressed by
colonial land rioters, Shaysites, Whisky Rebels, Populists, and members of the
Nonpartisan League, Industrial Workers , of the World, and the Farmers' Holiday
Association. All of these groups have been associated with the American left.
But the Weavers were obviously linked to rural America's culture of
vigilantism, in which any person or organization that threatened the hegemony
of white Christian manhood could be targeted for collective violence. These
actions and ideologies are associated with the extreme right. Native Americans,
African, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, and German Americans, labor-union
activists, socialists, and communists, Mormons, Catholics, and Jews all knew
men like Randy Weaver-and some who made Weaver seem almost benign.
But most confusingly and uncomfortably,
the Weaver story shows us that the roots of violence, racism, and hatred can be
and have been nourished in the same soil and from the same experiences that
generated rural movements for democracy and equality. In many places and at
many times in the American past, the best and worst, the most forgiving and
most vengeful, the most egalitarian and most authoritarian, the brightest and
the darkest of American life were alive in the same men's souls, nurtured at the
same dinner tables, learned in the same schools, and preached from the same
pulpits. Not twosets of beliefs, then, but two expressions of the same beliefs
and circumstances bound left and right together in an unwavering, desperate,
synthetic embrace. This interrelationship cannot and should not be ignored.
Historians and politicians who perpetuate these division between the left and
right in the
rural past and present, who marginalize the extremes of American politics, or
who refuse to acknowledge the essential "Americanness" of groups they
find unconscionable do so at their peril. For however much scholars and
politicians may want to recover a usable Populist past by ignoring its sourer
side, they must nonetheless recognize that the curdled Populism of hatred,
intolerance, and vigilante violence has-temporarily perhaps--seized the day in
our United States.
After the shooting, the Weaver girls
were sent back to live among Vicki's Iowa relatives and friends, whom they
could barely remember. It was difficult, even sickening at times, for the
Jordisons to have such hatred and bitterness in their house. They were
disgusted by the racist and anti-Semitic literature that came in the mail and
by the checks, large and small, that poured in for the girls' support and their
father's legal defense from groups like the KKK. But the Jordisons could not
cast the Weaver girls away by pretending that they bore no resemblance to
themselves. The Jordisons and the Weavers were related by blood.
"Let's keep the grain and export the farmers
THE FAILURE OF RURAL PRODUCER RADICALISM IN POSTWAR
AMERICA
But if Randy anci Vicki Weaver had grown
up in the traditional seedbed of rural producer radicalism, why did they choose
hatred and violence over collective protest for democratic change? Instead of
attending Family Day at the Aryan Nations compound why weren't they singing at
a Farm Aid concert or trying to stop a local farm foreclosure? We cannot know
the answer to this question completely, as it requires a psychological inquiry
that falls outside the parameters of this book. But we can discover part of the
answer by exploring the social and political context in which their choice was
made. As Alan Brinkley has argued, the transformation of the reform liberalism of
the early, twentieth century (with ties to rural producer radicalism) into the
compensatory liberalism of our time neglected the values and frustrated the
ambitions of lower- middle-class an6 working-class whites in rural America.
Moreover, it effectively limited whatever radical change they might otherwise
have endorsed. Whereas North Carolina Regulators, Shaysites, Whisky Rebels,
Populists, Nonpartisan Leaguers, and members of the Farmers' Holiday
Association all demanded fundamental changes to the economic and political
structure of the United States, few liberal politicians or influential groups
in the rnid-twentieth century sought measures nearly as transformative. Instead
they sought a corporate-friendly liberalism that did not change capitalism but
softened its edges and supposedly spread its opportunities to all Americans. By
the 1970s a growing number of white men in rural America had come to believe
that this kind of liberalism had little or nothing to offer them.
Although many farm radicals were
deeply suspicious of New Deal programs for agriculture that controlled
production and empowered 'brainy' govenunent experts, one thrust of the
Agricultural Adjustment Act suited them just fine-the tax on large processors
to pay for farm subsidies. As we have seen, corporate middlemen had long been
targets of rural producer radicals who believed that these 'nonproducers'
siphoned off profits made by honest laborers. Now the profits of some middlemen
were, at least in a small way, being distributed back to small producers who
desperately needed them. Other early New Deal programs had the same effect on
corporations and monopolies: the National Recovery Act forced big businesses to
control prices and wages. The Wagner Act legalized collective bargaining and
prevented owners from retaliating against union organizers or strikers.
According to the most ardent anti- monopolists in the early New Deal, this
assault on 'bigness' was critical to the ongoing social, cultural, and moral
health of the nation. As New Dealer Saul Nelson put it, for example, 'The
monster is a menace not because of the way he acts, but simply because he is
too large. [We must fight for] the maintenance of the freedom of individual
opportunity and the encouragement of small independent businesses."' To
others, this fight meant keeping a check on the size of the federal government
too. Simply regulating large corporations and monopolies was a bad idea, they
argued, not only because it would allow monopolies to persist, but also because
it would lead to a burgeoning bureaucratic state. Robert Jackson, a prominent
member of the Justice Department in 1937, feared that someday super-powered
bureaucrats might 'operate the whole business life of the United States from a
government office building."'
Despite the fervor of antimonopolism in
the early New Deal, however, the era of reform liberalism had already passed.
Most antimonopolists realized that it was impossible to re-create an economy
based on small production. Moreover, as the Supreme Court overturned key pieces
of antimonopolist legislation-including the first AAA-and the 1937 recession
forced New Dealers to reassess their goals, the reform of corporate capitalism
was nearly forgotten. A new breed of Roosevelt of- ficials even argued against
such a reform: "It is ridiculous to speak of breaking up 'big
business," said Representative Maury Maverick of Texas in 1939. "We
need big business. We need monopolies.... To talk of returning to arts and
crafts is not only romantic, it is impossible.
Likewise, these officials believed that a powerful
federal government was not an evil but a necessity. The state needed to become
a strong and constant presence with powers separate from, even insulated from
the representatives of the people in Congress."
Thus by 1945 many if not all of the
programs of the New Deal had lost their roots in reform liberalism. Rather than
do away with large corporations, the government nurtured them. Likewise,
government programs validated the ambitions of big farms, big industries, and
big labor unions. Small producers were still important, of course, but not for
what they produced as much as for what they-like all Americans, rich or poor,
black or white, young or old--consumed. Thus federal programs and policies were
designed to protect Americans' purchasing power more than their productive
power. Social security and unemployment compensation, fiscal policy, and even
farm subsidies were designed to spread the benefits of the marketplace across
the spectrum of human experience without damaging the economy in any
fundamental way. In a sense they redistributed income just as the first AAA
had, but with one crucial difference. By 1940 this redistribution of wealth was
being paid for by all taxpayers, not just by large corporations. As Brinkley
puts it, 'The liberal vision of political economy in the 1940s ... rested on
the belief that protecting consumers and encouraging mass consumption, more
than protecting producers and promoting savings, were the principal responsibilities
of the liberal state.... It would not reshape capitalist institutions. It would
reshape the economic and social environment in which those institutions
worked." Barton Bernstein remarks that however radical they seemed to
some, these were conservative achievements at best.
Liberalism moved even further from its
roots in the 1960s and 1970s. In those years, a commitment to social welfare
and individual freedom led many whites-elites in particular-to join with
leaders of minority groups to bring race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality into
sharp focus. Such issues and alliances troubled some rural whites. Not only had they been raised in
a landscape of traditional racial and gender divisions and taught to respect a
hard-earned dollar, but they were conservative about many other issues as
well-abortion, homosexuality, divorce--anything that seemed to neglect the
teachings of the Bible. And they were especially wary of any suggestion that
they might voluntary or involuntarily give up their guns, those long-time
fixtures of rural self-defense. Still, as long as rising standards of living
and a shared faith in American nationalism and internationalism prevailed, many
rural Americans, in the North especially, tried to accommodate new government programs
and the ideas behind them. When both these trusts were perceived as betrayed in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the frailty of the Democratic alliance
between eastern liberals, poor African Americans and Hispanics, and rural and
urban lower-middle-class and working-class whites was made plain.
George Wallace understood these
frustrations and he made the most of them. Some Americans on farms and in small
towns and working-class white neighborhoods were tired of sending their sons
off to fight the Vietnam War, a war the government did not seem to want to win.
They were tired of turning on the television every night and finding more
footage devoted to the gyrations of anti-war demonstrators than to the war
itself. They were tired of the emerging women's liberation movement, which
seemed to discount the value of motherhood and by extension the power of
patriarchy. They were tired of being told what to do and where to go by
"pointy-headed bureaucrats with their briefcases." And they were
tired of seeing their incomes stagnate and their children's chances to succeed
fade while the government set up special programs so that African Americans and
other "disadvantaged" Americans could have a better chance. Since the
early nineteenth cen- tury, rural Americans had struggled to establish and
maintain their place in the American middle class. By 1968, and increasingly in
the 1970s and 1980s, they found no more room for themselves there, and few
politicians willing to listen to their point of view.
Wallace
voters were angry. Many were also racist, sexist, and antielitist; they were
not necessarily political conservatives, as conventionally understood. They
were, more exactly, Americans for whom New Deal and Great Society liberalism
had not delivered on its promise, if it had made a promise at all. This
conviction was underscored by the results of a confounding election-year poll:
the majority of those who supported Wallace for president in 1968 (the year
Richard M. Nixon
and Hubert H. Humphrey were the major contenders) had named Robert Kennedy as
their second choice." It would take time and even more stagnation of the
economy, but by 1980 disaffection and frustration of working-class and
middle-class whites would effect a pro- found realignment of the political
parties and help to launch a major cultural shift away from "bigness"
and toward the political and cultural right, with all its contradictions. By
1996 the Republican Party-de- spite its desire to provide tax cuts to the rich
and to continue protection for large corporations-would have inherited the
rhetorical mantle of Populism in American politics. In January 1996,
Republicans and Democrats alike would cheer when they heard a small-town
southern-bom president tell them that 'the age of big government is over."
Despite the transformation of
liberalism and the emergence of the New Right, several farm-based
organizations-the National Farmers' Union (NFO) and the American Agriculture
Movement (AAM) especially-continued to swim against the tide. Like rural
producer radicals before them, they advocated small production and stressed the
fundamental importance of agrarian life to democracy in the United States. They
did so in the context of two economic crises in the countryside which
threatened the future of family farming in the United States and made rural
Americans question the commitment of the federal government to small
production. Their small successes reveal how meaning- ful the old slogans of
rural producer radicalism still were to many farmers. Their failures reveal how
difficult it had become to effect significant change within the modern liberal
state.
When World War II ended, the needs of
hungry people in Europe and Asia forced crop prices higher and convinced GIs to
return to their country homes to make a living. Within ten years, however,
global overproduction translated into failing prices, even pockets of poverty,
in the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth. Farmers had of- ten been
caught in a squeeze between the costs they paid for consumer goods and the
prices they received for crops. In the 1950s, however, they were more dependent
on consumer goods than they had been be- fore and thus the squeeze was tighter
as well. The conversion of nearly every farm from horsepower to diesel power
which was completed in this decade simultaneously increased productivity and
costs. In 1948 a farmer in Webster City, Iowa, for example, could buy a tractor
for $2,000 and sell hogs for $20.00 per hundredweight and corn for $1.25 a
bushel. By 1960 the tractor was going for $3,500, while hogs were fetching only
$12.00 per hundredweight and com a dollar per bushel Although
farmers loved being their own boss, many realized that they could do better
working in factories, where wages and benefits were ris- ing, than running
their own farms. Between 1960 and 1970 around one hundred thousand farmers sold
their farms and abandoned whatever hope remained of independent proprietorship.
Economic
frustrations like these were bad. Learning that the government agency that was
supposed to be helping farmers to succeed was actually trying to encourage them
to quit was even worse. Some farmers had long suspected that the USDA was not
really on their side: farm programs did, after all, provide incentives for
expansion, not conservation, and historically a far greater proportion of the
USDA’s budget went to large landholders than to small. In July 1962, however,
they discovered the whole truth. A study published for the USDA’s Committee for
Economic Development argued that profitability in farming could be guaranteed
only by a significant reduction of the number of farms in operation. Thus it
recommended that in the next five years nearly twenty million acres of cropland
and one-third of all farmers be "retired.' Afterward, the free market, not
production controls or farm subsidies, would take over. The remaining farms
would be bigger and better, more efficient, more powerful in negotiations with
buyers and distributors, and more like the successful corporations of the
international economy."
Farmers across America were outraged, determined to stand up for
themselves and their ways of life, and ready to take charge of their futures.
In September 1955 hog producers had joined together to begin the National
Farmers' Organization (NFO) in Corning, Iowa. Their goal, like that of the
Farmers' Holiday Association of the Great Depression era, was to raise prices
for crops to cost-of-production plus a small profit. But to do so, they needed to
increase their bargaining power with purchasers who set crop prices. Since the
late nineteenth century, farmers had used cooperatives for this purpose. Seven
million farmers belonged, to nearly ten thousand cooperatives in 1955. Still,
prices for crops did not rise. The NFO concluded that only 'holding actions'
(like the FHAs strikes) would demonstrate the collective power and resolve of
small farmers. By the late 1950s as many as 180,000 farmers had joined the NFO
and promised to keep farm products off the market until prices increased and
costs declined. Organizer Oren Staley told members in Des Moines in 1962 that
they were "the most underpaid group in America.' Again and again, he
asked, "Are you with us?" Again and again the crowd roared its
affirmation of the NFO's political agenda and of rural producer radicalism as a
whole.'
The NFO staged a series of holding
actions for various commodities between 1959 and 1969. The first important
action was in 1962 and involved hogs and cattle. NFO leaders assigned
'checkers' to establish roadblocks on major routes into market cities to see
whether farmers were violating their agreement not to sell. Pressure tactics
like these were effective. Hog receipts fell 20 percent and prices rose. Thus
in August 1964 the hog-and-cattle holding action was repeated. In March 1967
the NFO turned its attention to dairy products. Members attracted national
attention by pouring thousands of gallons of milk onto city streets. One
Wisconsin dairyman, for example, spilled out the milk of 450 cows. As historian
Gilbert Fife tells it, in the spring of 1968, NFO members "killed several
hundred calves and mature cattle, and threatened to destroy 12 million pounds
of meat if packers did not negotiate prices and sign con- tracts. 1127 Finally, in 1969, farmers
organized the 'farmers' survival drive'-a parade of tractors which converged on
Washington, D.C. "The time for complacency is past,' announced one
driver.
Although they certainly attracted
attention, the holding actions and tractorcades sponsored by the NFO did not
halt the depopulation of the countryside. Nor did they change the federal
government's commitment, through subsidies and tax policies, to large-scale
production. They did not even raise prices for long. In many cases, as soon as
holding actions had secured higher prices and were called off, members rushed
their products to market and deflated prices once again. Moreover, the flagrant
waste of food angered many urban Americans who by the 1960s could hardly
remember the ties to agriculture they (or even their food) once had. 'Now I
wouldn't pay them two cents more for a tubful if I could help it," a city
woman reportedly declared when she saw milk flowing down the streets. Violence also accented the
class divisions that had divided farmers for most of the century. Unlike a
labor union that could control labor by a closed shop, struggling farmers could
not force their wealthier neighbors to participate in holding actions-.except
through intimidation and threats. During each holding action, farmers who did
not participate complained that their tires had been slashed, windows broken,
fences cut, and barns burned. In Bon- duel, Wisconsin, in 1964, one truck on
its way to market refused to stop for NFO pickets. Two picketers were killed
under its wheels. Only the quick work of local policemen saved the life of the
driver from the hands of the angry crowd that gathered at the scene of the
accident.
A temporary solution to the problems
faced by small producers in the United States came with a reversal of fortune:
the agricultural boom of the mid-1970s. Burgeoning farm exports-the 1973
U.S./Soviet wheat deal led the way--and surging crop prices encouraged farmers
to plant fence row to fence row on as much land as they could fence. Improved
economic conditions made farmers happy. The ambitious, hi-tech management style
many of them adopted made the officials at the USDA ecstatic. To encourage even
more farmers to do what Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz recommended-"get
bigger, get better, or get out'-the Farmers'Home Administration provided
low-cost loans for land and new equipments Soon many a farmer who had once
owned a quiet half-section of com or wheat or cotton became a 'windshield
farmer"-one whose landholding was so vast that he could supervise the
entire operation only from behind the wheel of a pick-up truck
Rising
land prices also dramatically changed farm life. In Iowa, for example, an acre
of farm land rose from $419 in 1970 to $2,066 in 1980. Surging values like
these turned many farmers into "paper millionaires" practically
overnight. Moreover, increased collateral in land provided even more
opportunities to take out loans. Soon some farm families began to enjoy the
prosperity of the postwar era and to indulge in the consumer culture that had
been out of reach. In the South, purchases of such domestic products as washing
machines and passenger cars diminished the difference between southern and
northern farmers in all but the poorest (often African American) enclaves. In
the North, farmers began to do things their parents and grandparents would
never have even imagined, such as taking family vacations in Florida.
The
vacations ended as quickly and as suddenly as they had begun. As the United
States increased production of foodstuffs, so did other nations. Soon global
markets were flooded and prices began to plummet. Lost income encouraged
farmers to try to grow even more, but (as always) overproduction merely drove
prices down further. Three years of killer drought destroyed many harvests in
the Southeast. Meanwhile, inflation and the oil crisis created by an Arab
embargo increased prices for essential consumer goods. In 1980 the Carter
admin- istration placed an embargo on exports to the Soviet Union after that
nation invaded Afghanistan. The final blow, however-the blow that, as one
official explains, "threw [farmers) into the[irl windshield[sl'- was
sharply rising interest rates. Many farmers had taken out loans with adjustable
rates, never thinking the rates could rise much above 12 or 14 percent. By the
early 1980s they would have risen to nearly 22 percent. Inevitably, land values
began to plummet--declining by more than 50 percent in some regions. Average
family incomes followed suit. In Iowa, for example, the average net income fell
more than 50 percent in 1981-82. By 1983 it was actually in negative
numbers
What happened next was, in the words
of one Georgia farmer, 'a nightmare that [will] never go away."' From North
Dakota to Texas and Alabama to Colorado, farmland that had been held by
families for more than a century was lost to foreclosure in less than half a
decade. Children whose families grew food endured the humiliation of being
unable to buy it themselves. Huge numbers of men struck out for the Sun Belt,
in search of a job, any job, that might help them save their land. Farm women
likewise sought off-farm employment in factories and offices. They learned to
combine new sets of authorities and responsibilities with all the others they
had juggled before. As farms failed, so did rural businesses; towns began to
resemble ghettos with boarded-up stores and abandoned buildings in the midst of
verdant pastures, fields, and or- chards. Families neglected health care and
waited for hours in lines for emergency food distributions. Not surprisingly,
rates of rural suicides in- creased. So did domestic violence and murder. Jim
Jenkins, the Minnesotan who murdered his banker and then committed suicide, was
hardly the only rural American to kill and be killed by the overwhelming grief
brought on by loss of land, community, and independence. Desperation was
countered by activism. In 1977 four farmers sitting in a small restaurant in a
hard-hit area of eastern Colorado concluded that times were bad and getting
worse, and that they had to do something about it. Moreover, they said that the
federal government was not only unresponsive to the needs of small producers
but actually made life worse for them by encouraging indebtedness and
dishonesty. Similarly, large farm organizations-even the once-radical Farmers'
Union-had begun to represent their own interests with more fervor than their
constituencies'. They had, for example, supported the Farm Bill of 1977, which
clearly favored large-scale over small-scale produc- tion. Now the associated
credit agencies of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Farmers'Union
were actually foreclosing on land. A new farmers' organization that could speak
for all farmers and demand the return to 100-percent parity (100 percent of the buying power of
the agricultural sector during the good years between 1909 and 1914) was
overdue. Dependent on the programs of government and the representation of
lobbyists, neither of which had the best interests of small producers in mind
but merely paid lip service to them, family farmers had become politically
lethargic-a lethargy that had done them no small amount of harm
These four farmers began the American
Agriculture Movement, which in the late 1970s spread like wildfire across the
countryside. Organized in small cells with no dues, no rules, and no formal
leadership, the AAM boasted eleven hundred local offices in forty states by the
middle of 1978. Members agreed that a farm strike was the best way to increase
prices. But attracting national attention to the problems farmers were facing
and the importance of family farming to American culture was even more
important. To this end, AAM members held loud and angry press conferences and
gathered in large groups at local farm foreclosures. Like so many rural groups
before them, the AAM made use of their collective strength (both literal and
figurative) to promote action and gain attention. As William Browne noted, 'the
combined effect was one designed to demonstrate anger, activism, pur- poseful
resolve, and an implied threat of disruption and perhaps even violence if
cooperation was not forthcoming."'
AAM
members proved their resolve and their ability to disrupt when they staged two
tractorcades on Washington in 1978 and 1979. On January 18, 19 78, three
thousand farmers went to Washington in tractors, campers, and pick-ups,
determined to make an impression on lawmakers and emphasize their
uncompromising demand for 100-per- cent parity. This they did. Forgotten for so
many years, now farmers basked in the media and congressional attention. 'They
poured out of every corner to meet with us,' one farmer recalled. 'When I saw
all that, I knew we were damned important." Another remembered, 'We thought
we owned the damned town, we knew it, by God." Legislators did agree to
some emergency changes to the farm bill. Nevertheless, an offer of 100-percent
parity, which would have increased food prices in urban America, was not
forthcoming. Now anger replaced the thrill of power and influence. 'We were
sold out,' said one member. 'It was a setup from day one."
The
second tractorcade took an even angrier and less compromising tone as the AAM
tried to 'shut down Washington.' On February 5, 1979, a line of tractors twenty-five miles
long snarled traffic coming into the city. Farmers rammed police cars with
their tractors, delayed commuters for hours, and even contributed to the
cancellation of an important presidential meeting. Eventually, police succeeded
in corralling the farm vehicles on the Washington Mail, but incidents of.
property destruction and personal intimidation continued. A few farmers drove
their tractors up the steps of the Capitol, released chick- ens and goats on
the grass, threw tomatoes at Secretary of Agriculture Robert Bergland, and set
three old tractors on fire. Not surprisingly, congressmen were much less
impressed with the activists than they had been the year before. When one
complained that 'they didn't have any trouble Rike this] last year," the
farmers replied, 'Yeah, and we didn't get anything last year either."
Later, President Ronald Reagan would make a joke out of such altercations,
saying "Let's keep the grain and export the farmers."'
Not
surprisingly, the AAM never succeeded in achieving its goal of 100-percent
parity. Moreover, it was broadly criticized for being un- willing to
compromise, bargain, or even negotiate in the ways that lobbyists in the modern
state were expected to. But that was just the point; the leaders of the AAM
refused to act like lobbyists because they did not want to be lobbyists. They
did not want to be entrenched members of the Washington bureaucracy but genuine
representatives of rural people. Thus their radicalism became their undoing.
Although the AAM remains a strong renegade voice challenging the agribusiness
establishment in Washington, the economic and cultural positions of farmers are
as tenuous as ever. While the Farm Bill of 1985 did provide debt relief and
bankruptcy protection to small farmers who had man- aged to survive, its
provisions still provided significant incentive for expansion and for the
majority of payments to go to the minority of landholders. The total phase-out
of farm subsidies passed by the 1996 Republican Congress may impair the
viability of small producers more than any earlier farm bill did. Many
farmers-including those in the Iowa Farm Bill Study Team who agreed that the
federal bureaucracy had to go, but could not simply abandon farmers
overnight-may soon see that neither compensatory liberalism nor Newt Gingrich
conservatism will solve farmers' problems in the long run. That will require a
different kind of imagining altogether.
Grass-roots organizations of the early
1980s were more successful in helping farm families than the AAM was in
changing the federal government's business-as-usual. First in Iowa, and then in
many other states, farm activists-including representatives of the AAM-joined
with religious, educational, and philanthropic groups to help farmers survive
the crisis. Beginning in 1982, the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, for example,
provided the model on which the National Save the Family Farm Coalition was
based. It included Prairiefire Rural Action groups, the Farm Survival Hotline,
ninety-nine county Farm Survival committees, the Iowa Inter-Church Agency for
Peace and justice, the Bank Closing Response Team, and the Farm Credit System
Task Force. Together these agencies tried to help farmers find food, access
social services and health care, renegotiate debt, hire a lawyer, avoid
foreclosure, cope with an unavoidable foreclosure, and even test their water
for contaminants.
Like the Populists, Nonpartisan
Leaguers, and socialists before them, the National Save the Family Farm
Coalition moved quickly to form alliances outside the farm belt. For example,
the AAM shipped wheat to the wildcat strikers of the United Mine Workers in
West Virginia. The Iowa Coalition welcomed support from the state office of the
United Automobile Workers. For the first time in half a century, farm activists
saw clearly that the economic circumstances of farmers and workers were linked.
They saw that as the farm crisis deepened so did the trend toward
deindustrialization in much of the Northeast and Midwest. Large employers, like
the Chrysler plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had traditionally provided jobs not
just to men and women in town but also to farmers who left farming or needed
extra cash." When it closed in the 1980s, suddenly and permanently, a
major economic influence in the countryside disappeared too. All across the
landscape the same pattern emerged. Traditional factories closed up and many
workers moved away. Then, sometimes, if a town was 'lucky,' a new employer
moved in. These new employers, however, like the builders of the Saturn plant
in Spring Hill, Tennessee, attached their own strings with predictable
consequences: lower wages, fewer benefits, decreased controls over safety,
surging land prices, and higher worker and community turnover. The fundamental changes
of postindustrial capitalism forced political activists in the tradition of
rural producer radicalism to consider links with people whose lives had once
seemed altogether different from their own."
Farm
activists also made alliances with feminist groups. As we have seen, farm women
had participated in many of the community-based farm organizations in the past,
including the Grange, the People's Party, and the Farmers' Holiday Association.
They had used their own skills as community organizers to help their families
endure. In this kind of day-to-day way, farm women had looked to promote
equality in their marriages, workplaces, and communities without upsetting
traditional ways of life. During the farm crisis of the 1980s, however, women's
specific concerns crept closer to the forefront of farm politics than they had
before. Groups of female farmers' and farm wives gathered to support one
another and demonstrate their solidarity as women. Likewise, women organized to
address such specific feminist issues as passage of the Equal Rights Amendment
and the rising rates of domestic violence in rural America. Some ran for public
office. Those who still preferred more supportive than activist roles answered
hot lines, met
with farmers in trouble, and advised friends. On all levels, and in a variety
of ways, individual women, women's skills, and even women's rights were central
to the grass-roots activism of the 1980s. More than they ever had before, women
defined the work and the network of rural producer radicalism. The farm
coalitions also reached out to environmentalists. Like miners and loggers,
farmers had at first been reluctant to join the con- temporary environmental
movement. They had considered the land part of 'nature's capital' provided for
them to use to feed the world and from which to profit. But in the late 1970s
and early 1960s some farmers began to realize that the pesticides and other
chemicals they used on the farm were not just killing bugs, they were
endangering the lives of rural people. They thought back to the USDA’s reaction
to what one historian calls the "bombshell in Beltsville," the 1962
publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. 17 So certain were government
officials of the safety of chemicals used in farming that they had laughed off
suggestions that DDT was ruining the environment and risking lives. For two
more decades, federal programs made it as easy to buy chemicals as to buy
children's shoes. Now some farm people looked to organic farming and
sustainable agriculture as possible ways to survive the crisis and survive as a
people.
Finally, some farm activists also
joined hands with the urban poor through Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. In
his bid for the presidency in 1988, Jackson spent many hours with farmers and
their families in Iowa and other states, seeking common cause among the diverse
people who found themselves on the short end of the Reagan revolution. Even
Jackson admitted that Iowa farmers were unlikely supporters of his mission. But
they surprised him. In January 1987 Jackson arrived in Greenville, Iowa, to
deliver a campaign address. He chose Greenville in part because he knew it had
been the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan in Iowa in the 1920s. Also he
believed that many Iowans had never seen a black person before. Iowans filled
the tiny church to overflowing, more excited than any group Jackson had ever
seen. "There was an emerging sense of a deep and abiding reunion," he
said later. ",,Lots of romance in it. People were trying to say so many things,
like they wish they had done this a long time ago.
The
sight of Iowa farmers grasping hands with African Americans, Hispanic
Americans, Native Americans, gay rights activists, and welfare mothers puzzled
many Americans. What did clean-cut, Christian farmers have in common with
people like them? But the Rainbow Coalition enraged the leaders of far-right groups who
had also tried to join the farm crisis activists in the heartland. Beginning in
1978, for example, the AAM looked toward the leaders and ideologies of the
right. By 1979 its own rhetoric had hardened, moving away from extolling
agrarian virtues to condemning a corporate conspiracy and interna- tional
bankers for the farmers' troubles. Even the peace-and-justice activists of the
Iowa Family Farm Coalition tried to work with right-wing groups. More and more
often, throughout the farm crisis, recruiters for the Posse Comitatus, the
Aryan Nations, Lyndon Larouche's many groups, and a host of smaller
organizations traveled to farm auctions and solicited funds from, and
disseminated literature to, angry farmers." These groups were extremely
varied in their beliefs. They shared a common conviction, however, that
conventional political mobilization was pointless. The federal government was under
the control of international Zionists, they said. It had no intention of help-
ing farmers, not now or ever. It intended to take them captive.
Explanations for the farm crisis that put the blame on un- American
conspirators, Jews, and corrupted elites made more sense (and sounded more
familiar to many rural Americans than the activists on the left wanted to
admit. It certainly felt more comfortable than creating alliances with the
urban poor. And to some farm men, it felt more comfortable than attending
support-group meetings or domestic-violence awareness lectures. And anyway,
many wondered, why would this nation's most honorable citizens suffer so
terribly un- less the government had been subverted by its enemies? Hadn't that
all happened before, even in this century? Not a long road, then, but a very
short one led some rural Americans from political activism on the left to
intolerance, hatred, anti-Semitism, and in some cases vigilantism on the right.
It was a well-traveled route.
…….. Since the end of the Vietnam War, hate
groups have increased in size, number, and diversity of beliefs. Some groups
have also grown more similar in temperament to the mainstream political right.
Most important, they have nearly all adopted the paramilitary and survivalist
style that Robert DePugh's Minuternen (white hate organization from the
1970s—see longer version) originated.
Indeed arms, survivalist training, and military-style maneuvers are the stock
in trade of most right-wing groups today. Yet, to many Americans outside the
new hate groups, paramilitarism is another of the aspects of rural radicalism
which seem contradictory. If people associated with the far right are against American
military intervention in world affairs, for example, why do they seem to love
the military? If they believe themselves to be radical patriots, why do they
hate the United States government? If Timothy McVeigh was such a 'good
soldier," why did he purportedly target a federal building that housed
recruiters and support services for the armed services?
The answers to these questions are found
in the same political and economic circumstances that brought about farm
activism on the left. As James William Gibson explains it, the Vietnam War was
a crushing blow to all Arnericans-but most of all to working- and middle-class
white men who had believed in the righteousness of the military's anti-
communist ideology. To them-Randy Weaver was one, Bo Gritz and Jim Jenkins two
others-it was unimaginable that so many lives had been lost for nothing and
that the most powerful government on the earth could have been defeated by a
tiny, underdeveloped Asian nation. Weren't American men the strongest, bravest,
and most deadly on earth? To them the Vietnam War was not just emotionally and
psychologically debilitating. It was politically alienating. It suggested that
the American government could no longer be trusted to fight the good fight and
to honor the men who had done so. It suggested that the American government
would rather pull out of a war than do what was necessary to win. It suggested
that the American government was not man enough to get the job done and to do
it right.
But perhaps individual American men
still were. Perhaps they could "bring the war back home" and, as
Rambo put it so well, "win it this time." For many men in rural
America-where farming and industry offered dead ends, incomes were stagnating
at best, farm organizations had been either demascutinized or feminized, and
the promise of a good life was practically a joke-paramilitarism and
survivalism offered a chance to prove their masculinity and honor. Moreover,
these activities provided opportunities for them to participate in vigilante
organizations as so many of their forefathers had in the past. Beginning in the
late 1960s and continuing throughout the 1980s and 1990s, rural men linked
their quest for what Susan Jefford calls "the remasculinization of
America" to their age-old heritage of hatred, intolerance, and
violence."
Henry Beach, a former member of William
Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, began a new organization in 1969 for exactly
these purposes. The Posse Comitatus, whose name means in Latin 'power of the
county," quickly spread through the West, Midwest, and parts of the upper
South. Members believed that no authority higher than the county sheriff and no
constitutional amendment beyond the first twelve were legally binding on any
Ainerican. Moreover, they believed that the pre- sent government was fully
overrun by Zionist conspirators. Thus if they were to comply with any federal
regulation-from paying taxes to making social-security payments or honoring
fish and wildlife regulations or even getting a driver's license-they would be
complicit in an international conspiracy. Beach believed that direct, vigilante
action was re- quired to stop the conspiracy. "In some instances of
record," he wrote, "the law provides for the following prosecution of
officials of government who commit criminal acts or who violate their oath of
office.... He shall be removed by the posse to the most populated intersection
of streets in the township and, at high noon, be hung by the neck, the body
remaining until sundown as an example to those who would subvert the law."
The Posse found many willing listeners
to their theories during the farm crisis. To desperate farmers, a
government-conspiracy theory explained how they could have so suddenly come
upon hard times. Moreover, the Posse's detailed legal clinics made it really
seem possible that people could refuse to pay their taxes on constitutional
grounds and that they could refuse to allow federal agents on their farms. Two
farmers-at least-followed this line of reasoning to their graves. Gordon Kahl
was a struggling farmer in Medina, North Dakota, who first refused to pay his
taxes in 1970. When four carloads of agents came to- arrest him in 1983, he and
his son killed two agents, wounded four more, and escaped. Kahl spent months on
the ruti, going from Posse safe-house to safe-house throughout the West
and South. Scores of agents surrounded his final hideout in the Ozarks; when a
hand-thrown grenade lit the thousands of rounds of ammunition stored there, the
bunker exploded in flame. Later Kahl's body had to be identified by dental
records."
Nebraska farmer Arthur Kirk also
listened when the Posse talked. He was in danger of losing the land his family
had farmed for many years. Deeply in debt to a local bank in Grand junction,
Kirk sold cattle he had promised as collateral. He warned local officials not
to try to serve him with legal papers of any kind. He believed, as members of
the Posse and a
related organization had told him, that if he posted special notices on the
property no state authority could trespass on it. He did this, but still the
officials came. Kirk pointed a weapon at the first one. Soon a state SWAT team
swarmed around the farmhouse. Kirk stayed inside surrounded by weapons
including M-16s and an elephant gun loaded with armor-piercing ammunition.
Finally he went outside to reach a fortified bunker by his windmill.
"Fucking Jews!' he shouted as he ran. He shot more than fifty rounds at
the police before he was killed by bullets to the shoulder and leg. Inside the
house, investigators found Posse literature that read, 'I don't think the CIA
or the FBI is part of the U.S. government. I think it is part of the Mossad,
the Jewish police. In fact, I think the Mossad is world-wide and that all
police organizations like the CIA and FBI in all countries are under the
Mossad."' Kirk's wife never forgave agents for denying her access to her
husband and spent the next several years traveling around the Midwest telling
her story and warning that the Mossad was preparing to come after other
families too.
It
was not only the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s that pushed people like
Kahl and Kirk away from traditional agrarian protest to paramilitarism,
anticommunism, and Identity Christianity. By that time much of the political
mainstream was listening to similar, albeit subtler, messages from the New
Right. While a survey found that an or- dinary person's fear of the right in
1968 had ranked well down the list, by 1980 'the irrelevant right' had become
very relevant indeed. In the 1950s and 1960s such anticommunist crusaders as
Billy James Hargis of Tulsa, Oklahoma, traveled in converted buses to
small-town revivals. In the late 1970s and 1980s such anticommunist
evangelicals as Billy Graham, Jim Bakker, and Pat Robertson took limousines to
Republican national conventions. During their conversion to Identity
Christianity, Vicki and Randy Weaver purportedly listened to evangelical radio
shows daily. The sermons did not force the Weavers to become white separatists,
but they did reinforce the Weavers' hatred of bigness in government and
industry, fear of communism, their belief that Americans were a chosen people,
and their desire to reinvent American patriotism. So must have the secular
sermonizing of politicians of the New Right. As conservative commentator Kevin
Phillips remarked-metaphorically, but nonetheless prophetically-" [these
new conservatives] have more in common with Andrew Jackson than with Edmund
Burke. Their hope is to build cultural siege-cannon out of the populist steel
of Idaho, Mississippi,
and working-class Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment
to ideo-institutional smithereens.
The racism and anti-Semitism of rural
hate groups was encouraged by the evangelism-secular and sacred-of the New
Right as well. For all their protestations to the contrary, evangelicals
continued to associate America's financial problems with international bankers.
In Pat Robert- son's 1995 book, The New World Order, the preacher defines
the intemational conspiracy that threatens the collapse of freedom and liberty
in the United States. And while he claims to have no animus toward Jews, those
primarily responsible are European bankers, financiers, and
industrialists-people whom more forthright Populists would have simply called
Jews." Likewise the New Christian Right's use of racial code words to
describe the decay of American society has fooled few Americans on either side
of the political aisle. In short, the most powerful and violent rural groups in
recent years have combined anticommunism, paramilitarism, racism, and
anti-Semitism and taken to extremes the intolerances of the mainstream culture
of the New Right. Moreover, they have done so at a time when even the most
ardent advocates of compensatory liberalism have backed away from that position
and when the tradition of reform liberalism and rural producer radicalism is
hard even to recall.
But what exactly are the new groups
that have taken root in the countryside? The best known and most closely
watched is the Aryan Nations. Begun by Richard Butler in 1979, the Aryan
Nations is located on a fenced and guarded compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho.
Butler chose Idaho for its rugged beauty, inexpensive land, low tax rate, and
socially conservative population-some of whom he recruited as members . The Aryan Nations believes
that Jews are waging war to eliminate all white Christians of English,
Germanic, and Scandinavian heritage. Homosexuality, popular culture, and
immigration are all part of the larger plot to dilute and destroy the gene pool
of white men. The Holocaust too was a hoax, perpetuated by Jewish bankers and
intellec- tuals to justify the killing of millions of white Christians. The
Nations anticipates and prepares for the coming race war. As Butler's ally
William Potter Gale puts it, 'God said you're g6nna do it that way, and it's
about time somebody is telling you to get violent, whitey.
Get violent they did. By the mid-1980s
an offspring of the Aryan Nations had proved even deadlier than the parent
organization. Named for an elite guard in the German army, the Bruder
Schweigen, the Silent Brotherhood, or Order, was the brainchild of Nations
member Robert Jay Mathews who had been inspired-like Timothy McVeigh-by the 1978
William Pierce novel The Turner Diaries. In the novel, ZOG begins to
attack white Christian Americans. In response, small cells of militarily
prepared men retaliate, eventually reclaiming the nation for their kind. In the
process, African Americans, Jews, Asians, and Chicanos are summarily executed,
murdered, bombed, and tortured.
This
reclamation sounded like a good idea to Mathews and his fellows in the Order,
but it would cost money. To prepare for their own battle, the Order
counterfeited money, robbed stores, and held up armored cars for heists of
millions of dollars. Then they began to buy land, arms, and other provisions
necessary to establish survival camps and hideouts. Finally they chose their
targets for execution. First on the list was Alan Berg, a well-known radio
talk-show host in Denver, who often asked neo- Nazis to phone him and then
lambasted them on the air. Order members ambushed Berg at his car, pumping his
body full of more than thirty bullets. When the murder weapon was found at the
home of one of the members of the Order, a nationwide manhunt for Mathews
began. It ended with a firestorm-not unlike the one that ended Gordon Kahl's
lifs---when a magnesium illumination flare was fired from an FBI helicopter
circling a house on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, where Math- ews was hiding.
The flare burned through the roof of the house, ignited the stores of
ammunition inside, and, as James Coates phrased it, 'incinerated Mathews in the fire of his own engines of
hatred.”
Other
groups in our time have also taken up arms against intolerable elements in
American society. The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), for
example, was founded in 1976 by Texas fundamentalist minister Jim Ellison, who
moved to the Ozarks when he converted to Identity Christianity. Like Idaho, the
Ozarks are rugged, inexpensive, and popular among fundamentalists, radical
patriots, and back-to-the landers. But even there, the CSA stood out for its
beliefs. Ellison practiced polygamy and was said to have kidnaped hitchhikers
to become new members. On the CSA compound, believ- ers stored sophisticated
equipment that enabled them to produce hand grenades and cyanide compounds, and
they built a weaponry-training facility modeled after the FBI facility in
Quantico, Virginia. Targets held cardboard cutouts of Menachem Begin and Golda
Meir. Ellison was proudest of the support-through funds and armaments-that he
gave to other radical patriot groups. The CSA, for example, provided the MAC 10
gun that the Order used to murder Alan Berg."'
But CSA members also did some dirty work
themselves, so much in fact that eventually the federal government shut the
compound down. In 1983 Richard Wayne Snell killed an African American state
trooper in Arkansas with a gun he had specially altered at the compound. Next
Ellison and William Thomas torched the Beth Shalom synagogue in Indianapolis,
Indiana. Finally, in April 1985, CSA recruit David Tate, who had ties to the
Order and the California lgan, murdered a thirty-year-old Missouri state
trooper named Jinunie Linegar. He escaped into the Missouri countryside, where
for six days he lived out a real-life survivalist fantasy. When he finally gave
himself up, the FBI authorized a full-scale raid on the CSA compound. SWAT
teams stormed the gates while residents fled to hide in a center bunker. They
agreed to surrender on the promise that their leaders would not be jailed with
African Americans."
Some
violent acts were not sponsored or organized by specific groups, but were
nevertheless expressions of the extremist ideology that had pervaded the
countryside in the 1980s. In Wileyville, California, for example, two
survivalists were suspected of killing as many as twenty-five people,
especially young women they lured into their com- pound and then tortured to
death, all the while explaining that they were searching for the perfect
'warrior wives” In Cokevflle, Wyoming,
a couple took an arsenal of weapons into an elementary school. This was so
commonplace, however, that even a town council member who saw them was not
alarmed. Then the couple announced that they were beginning "the Brave New
World' and took all 167 teachers and children hostage. For six hours teachers
sang and held terrified children who were packed into a single classroom. The
ordeal ended when a gasoline bomb exploded in the woman's hands, killing her in
front of the children, and her husband committed suicide. More than twenty
children suffered severe burn injuries.
In Seattle in 1985, a knock on the
door on Christmas Eve began a nightmare that tied the extreme right of the
post-Vietnam era with the anti-Semitism and anticommunism of the Cold War.
David L. Rice, an unemployed loner who was a member of the militantly
anticommunist organization called the Duck Club, forced his way into the
home of Charles and Annie Goldmark. As a Christmas ham baked in the oven, he
compelled the wealthy lawyer, his wife, and two children-twelve- year-old Derek
and ten-year-old Colin-to lie on the floor. Then he handcuffed and tied their
hands behind them. Next he chloroformed them. Finally, he took a steam iron and
carving knife and stabbed and bludgeoned them. Eventually all would die of
massive bleeding and head injuries. Their bodies were found by family friends
who had been invited for Christmas dinner.
At his
trial, David Rice admitted to the slayings and insisted that he had been sane
at the time. He had killed the Goldmark family, he claimed, because thirty
thousand Communist Chinese and forty thou- sand North Korean troops were poised
at the borders ready to attack the United States. He had to do something to
stop the invasion, so he mur- dered the most prominent communist in Washington
state. But, as it turned out, Charles Goldmark was not a communist. His mother
had joined the Communist Party of America in the 1930s but quit soon afterward.
When his father, John Goldmark, had been a state legislator from rural
Washington-where the Goldmarks had moved to get away from 'all the crazy people
back east'-the local paper wrote a series of ar- ticles accusing him of having
communist ties as well. Eventually John Goldmark sued the paper for libel and
won the case. When a local judge ordered no damages paid, many local people
understood this action as an affirmation of Goldmark's guilt. In any case, John
Goldinark had died of cancer in 1979. His son David and his family had long
since moved to Seattle. But when Rice learned that he had killed the wrong man,
he was unrepentant. "Sometimes soldiers have to kill,' he explained. As
for the deaths of young Derek and Colin, he said, 'It might have been necessary
to sacrifice these lives for the greater good of mankind."'
More children's lives would be sacrificed at Ruby Ridge and in Waco and Oklahoma City. Many had already been sacrificed at Ludlow, Colorado, Conestoga, Pennsylvania, and the Mormon settlements on the Mississippi River. The history of bloodshed in rural America has been a long one. It has passed through every region and touched many a country town. Without a better understanding of its meanings, origins, and especially its ties to the politics of democracy and equality which have also been practiced in rural America, there will be no reason for the bloodshed to stop. Men who rape, kill, torture, and mutilate because they don't like how another person looks or behaves, what he or she believes, or for whom he or she works deserve no mercy from historians, politicians, or any other Americans. Yet we all must remember that these angry chants and threats have long been a part of the larger American chorus that, if it ever were to surrender the urge to hate and kill, might also break into song.