American White Nationalist Novels in Light of General American Historiography

in Light of General American Historiography

Overall, there are very few general works on American white nationalism and, other than a few sparse monographs on two white nationalist authors—Thomas Dixon and William Pierce, no works at all exist on white nationalist fiction. Reviewing the state of research on American white nationalism in general, however, does allow for the highlighting of particular monographs that pertain to certain aspects of white nationalist prose, even though direct references to such

33 http://www.youtu.be/eB5kQ2XDbAg. Uploaded by the Aspen Institute. 18.03.2014 (access: 24.04.2015).

works are scarce. The above notwithstanding, some of the theoretical positions adopted by the scholars mentioned below seem useful in the exploration of the white nationalist novel as a

‘source’ and as a product of the cultural conditioning of the environment from where such fictions originated.

The most frequently quoted work on the history of white nationalism is by noted Syracuse historian David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History.³⁴ Bennett’s work is a masterpiece of narrative history, “The best account we have of the Far Right in American history” (Front cover of the Vintage Books edition, 1995). His analysis of the various re/incarnations of nativism, which includes white nationalism, in the U.S., with its myriad of groups and splinters is second to none. However, while he does examine the Convent Exposés of the first wave of anti-Catholicism, Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy consisting of The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905) and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907) and William L. Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978), his analysis as to why the novels were written and what impact they have had are missing. Furthermore, he does not examine any other novels other than those mentioned above, leaving the Yellow Peril and first Red Scare literature of the 1870s–1920s aside, although to be fair, the Yellow Peril novels have been covered by other authors as seen below.

Furthermore, Bennett’s work is a major historically-oriented study, with white nationalist literature being an ancillary component of his research.

Before Bennett’s monumental work on the history of the American Far Right, the only books available were books on the history of the fear of conspiracy and/or subversion and the history of racial ideas within the United States. With the rise of the socially active social scientists of the early 1960s, history and its associated fields, including literary studies, entered a golden age of publishing. One of the first books to appear that examined America’s unique racial situation was Thomas F. Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America.³⁵ Gossett’s monograph is a good (if a bit dated) introduction to America’s racial conundrum; however, for the purposes of this study, Gossett’s most important contribution is the impact his book had on

34 David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). The book was reissued with a new introduction and chapter under the title The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement (New York:

Vintage Books, 1995).

35 Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Austin, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963).

future scholarly monographs. He does mention Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page but other than that, he examines no other white nationalist fiction authors.

A decade later, in the first two years of the 1970s, four books made their appearance that also impacted the way that future scholars of American white nationalism approached their subject(s). These books were: Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss’ edited work The Great Fear:

Race in the Mind of America (1970), The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Pulitzer Prize winning David Brion Davis’ edited volume The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, and Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History edited by Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown.³⁶ Largely, the above four books cover much the same ground, though The Great Fear concentrates mostly on how race has influenced American society. Furthermore, The Great Fear also includes an article on the American Indian, a topic not normally included in collections of essays on American racial attitudes at the time, which prefer to concentrate instead on the divisiveness between white and black. The essays in the study range from race in Colonial America to “Manifest Destiny and the Indian in the Nineteenth Century,” to race and the labor movement, a study of the “Sambo” character, with a concluding essay by psychohistorian Peter Lowenberg entitled “The Psychology of Racism.”

The Great Fear is wide-ranging in its approach to the topic; however, bearing the goals of the present study in mind, it does not cover any of the subject areas that are addressed here, especially because its scope entirely excludes white nationalist fiction.

While The Great Fear is interesting, it is the other works, specifically Davis,’ and Lipset and Rabb’s books that are the most important for the development of the study of race and Far Right in the United States. Davis’ work is a collection of documents relating to the idea of conspiracy/subversion and, while not related directly to the present project, it set the tone by which scholars studying the American Far Right took their cue. Furthermore, Davis’ opening essay “Some Themes of Countersubversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and

36 Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss, editors. The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), David Brion Davis, editor. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).

Anti-Mormon Literature” is typical of the rational way in which the study of paranoia and subversion is studied in these works:

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when danger of foreign invasion appeared increasingly remote, Americans were told by various respected leaders that freemasons had infiltrated the government and had seized control of the courts, that Mormons were undermining political and economic freedom in the West, and that Roman Catholic priests, receiving instructions from Rome, had made frightening progress in a plot to subject the nation to popish despotism. This fear of internal subversion was channeled into a number of countermovements which attracted wide public support. The literature produced by these movements evoked images of a great American enemy that closely resembled traditional European stereotypes of conspiracy and subversion (Davis 1971, 10).

Lipset and Raab’s work, on the other hand, is a general history on what the authors determine is “Right-Wing Extremism.” While the authors include Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society in their work, at present, most scholars would place them in the anti-communist camp, rather than in the modern anti-government white nationalist group. As an overview of the Far Right, the work contains various chapters ranging from “Before the Civil War” through to

“George Wallace and the New Nativism.” As with most works of this kind, the chapters contain slight references to the literature of the Far Right but never go into detail, nor do they analyze the Far Right novels within the overall feeling of trauma felt by the racist Right.

Curry and Brown’s collection of essays covers all aspects of the American history of conspiracy from Colonial America to McCarthyism. The essays examine Southern Slave Power, anti-Lincoln Copperheads, the Red Scare, Populism, the Progressive era Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin and the Depression era resistance to FDR and other issues. Within those topics, the editors propose:

Four major questions arise from a consideration of fears of conspiracy in American history. First, we must ask when these fears have been pervasive enough to affect national politics. Second, we must make clear against whom the numerous anticonspiracy crusades in our history have been directed. Third, we must ask why such fears exist. Finally, we need to know what effects the fear of subversion has had in shaping both political attitudes and specific government policies (Curry and Brown 1972, vii)

These four questions are answered by the authors of the essays; however, as regards the present work, the lack of examination of the Redeemer, Red Scare and other Far Right forms of literature is glaring.

One of the most understudied aspects of the white nationalist movement in the United States is religion among white nationalists, particularly Asatru or Odinist paganism and Christian Identity. Only two studies, Michael Barkun’s Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (1994) and Mattias Gardell’s Gods of the Blood: The Pagan

Revival and White Separatism (2003) have delved into, what most American Christians would argue, are the more peculiar aspects of white nationalist religious belief.³⁷ Unlike many scholars of the white nationalist movement, Barkun actually examines the fictional writings of the early 1940s Christian Identity adherents, namely Mog and Magog (published in 1942) and 1944’s When?, both published by the British Columbia British Israel Association. While his analysis is excellent from the eschatological point-of-view of the novels, he does not place them within the overall scheme of white nationalist fiction, nor does he examine the novel published by the Christian Identity Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations in 1992 Children of the Ice, written by Joseph Walthers. Gardell’s work is a massively complex tome spanning the earliest beginnings of racist paganism to 2003. Although he concentrates on the religious aspects of what is termed Asatru (the racist version of paganism/Odinism), he does not consider any other novels than The Turner Diaries, which it seems has become required reading for anyone studying or indeed, anyone who considers himself/herself a part of the white nationalist movement.

The precursors of not only The Turner Diaries, but of the American white nationalist movement as a whole, include the various incarnations of American nativism, as well as the numerous manifestations of the Ku Klux Klan, and the anti-immigrant movements. Therefore, the next subchapter examines the research that has been conducted on American nativism, which ties into the American white nationalist movement because both groups are suspicious of foreign influences and deeply aware of the shifting morality of America.