Redemption

By far, redemption is the most popular trope within white nationalist fiction and has been present since the nascent beginnings of the genre in the post-Reconstruction South. In general, redemption serves the main purpose of allowing characters to ‘find their way home’ as it were, back into the white family. From the perspective of the theory proposed in Chapter Three redemption shows that any white can become ‘disenchanted’ with progressive ideas on race and

‘return to the fold’ as it were. The idea that social liberalism and “cultural Marxism” are

‘enchanting’ ideologies is a very popular theme in white nationalism and became so when integration and other forms of social change gained steam in the late 1970s. Many white nationalists believe that a great ‘awakening’ will occur among the average white population and the ‘veil’ of who is really behind the ideas of “cultural Marxism” and its associated ideologies will be lifted. However, before an examination of the trope of redemption begins, it must be stated that in general, white nationalist novels published between 1921 (with the exception of Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Riders, published posthumously in 1924) and 1978 were influenced by three earth-shattering books: Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1921) and his Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (1922). These books were and are highly influential in white nationalist thought. In fact, it could be argued that all white nationalist books published after these three polemics continue to reinforce the themes within them. The cultural battles waged by white nationalists and conservatives in general against political correctness are a result of the work done by Grant and Stoddard, as was examined briefly in Chapter One. Stoddard looked at the First World War, calling it a “white civil war” and saw the crisis in Western civilization before anyone else in the United States, besides Grant. Stoddard’s first book used the new science of demographics and determined that the rise of what would become the Third World (mainly Asia and Africa but also, South America) would overthrow white world domination through outbreeding the white population. Stoddard’s second book

examined the ‘horrors’ of Communism—in Hungary, the then emerging USSR, the failed Spartacist revolt in Bavaria and elsewhere and determined that this ideology and associated ideologies—feminism, democratic socialism and to a certain extent, liberal Christianity spelled the end of the white race.

The most important aspect of Grant and Stoddard’s works is that they lay the problem of Communism and the “white civil war” at the feet of the Jews—thus, influencing future white nationalist theoreticians and writers. Before that time, most white nationalist theoreticians and writers concentrated on issues dealing with race in the United States, mainly the problem with the freed slaves or the influx of “Chinamen” into California but not the Jews.¹³⁴ However, that started to change with increased immigration of Jews from Central/Eastern Europe in the 1890s, and their influence over certain industries, especially Hollywood.¹³⁵ The “Jewish” influence, it was felt, was changing moral attitudes in the 1920s and was responsible for the rising crime and perversion.¹³⁶

To restate the basis of the idea of redemption in the white nationalist context, redemption is akin to the idea of becoming literally ‘disenchanted’ or un-enchanted with liberalism or progressivism and embrace the true calling of one’s blood, that of race. This process is normally gradual, as seen in the previous subchapter; however, it can strike a character in a ‘flash of cosmic consciousness’ as will be seen in this subchapter. Therefore, this section will examine the

134 For more on Grant and Stoddard, see respectively, Jonathan P. Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009) and James R.

Bachmann, “Theodore Lothrop Stoddard: The Bio-sociological Battle for Civilization,” Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1966. Bachmann’s dissertation has not been published and Stoddard remains a fairly unknown quantity in the study of both American white nationalism and the history of racism in the United States. This is a major tragedy, as it ignores the overwhelming influence that Grant had on Stoddard and that Grant’s and Stoddard’s writings had on the emerging American white nationalist movement in the 1920s-1940s.

135 While it may seem racist to state that Hollywood is controlled by Jews, it must be kept in mind that this is not a big secret in the Jewish community. Indeed, Hollywood and the ‘other’ Hollywood, i.e. the pornography community in the San Fernando Valley is known to be a virtual Jewish monopoly. See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own:

How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Random House, 1990), updated and in many editions, J. Hoberman and J. Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Michal Renor, From Shetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2016). For Jews in the ‘adult’ industry, i.e. ‘porn,’ see Legs McNeil, The Other Hollywood: An Uncensored Oral History of the American Adult Film Industry (New York: The Free Press, 2006) and various issues of Adult Video News, available at www.avn.com.

136 For an examination of Antisemitism in the United States, see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). It is interesting also that Jews do not feature prominently in white nationalist novels before the publication of The Turner Diaries in book form in 1978, though they are obliquely mentioned in William Twiford’s 1941 novel Sown in the Darkness: A. D.

2000.

trope through the characters of Felix Hyde, the fallen Cosmocrat leader in William R. Twiford’s 1941 novel Sown in the Darkness, A. D. 2000, John Schmidt, the history professor turned white nationalist in the 1988 novel by Michael A. Hoffman II A Candidate for the Order and two female protagonists penned by H. A. Covington, Kristen Kicky McGee from 2008’s The Brigade and Georgia Myers from 2013’s Freedom’s Sons.

William Twiford’s 1941 combination Yellow Peril, red peril and white separatist novel features several typical white nationalist themes, including a small group of educated and dedicated white revolutionaries, faith in the supremacy of the white race, an all-powerful federalized government and an evil ideology, Cosmocracy (a combination of the more liberal attitudes within Christianity and Communism), that is intent on destroying the power of the white race in the United States, and the world. However, the most obvious trope is that of redemption. In the novel, the Cosmocrat leader, Felix Hyde, fights the white revolutionaries tooth and nail, engaging in assassination attempts of the leaders, using the sexual prowess of his daughter, Marie, to ensnare one of the white Separatist leaders, all the while hiding his hypocrisy towards other races. This is also another important point within the theory of the defeated culture

—namely, many white nationalists believe that their opponents do not really believe in the equality that they so often preach. For Felix Hyde, the hypocrisy explodes when his daughter decides to marry a black boxer, the Bruiser. The confrontation between the two shows the white nationalist attitude towards, what they believe to be, the hypocrisy of their ideological opponents:

Felix Hyde was furious when he learned that his daughter was planning to marry a Negro. He had encouraged, through his championing of Cosmocracy, the ignoring of the color line; but his doctrine of the equality of man which he had so greatly furthered was for others not for himself. […]

“Daughter, what the hell is this I hear about you and that damn black?”

Marie bristled. “Since when have the blacks become damned, Dad? You had one as a law partner,”

she fired back.

“That makes no difference, daught,” Hyde thundered, “No white girl has any business marrying a black.”[…] “Listen, daught, don’t you know that if you marry the Bruiser you will disgrace yourself in the minds of all your white friends? They know that when we say the races should be equal that we are just doing it to get the votes we need to win” (Twiford 1941, 159-160).

While Marie goes on to marry the Bruiser and have a child by him, she eventually commits suicide, simultaneously killing the child by jumping off a bridge. The above quote exemplifies the idea that even the most ardent white liberals/progressives are not above the “call of the blood.” After the defeat of the Cosmocrats in the 1997 elections and Felix Hyde’s ‘dirty tricks’

were exposed, he was imprisoned in a cell of ‘Cosmocratic’ design, commonly known as the

‘Hellhole’ or, simply, the ‘hole’—a four foot by eight foot concrete cell thirty feet below ground with a mat, a small washbasin and an electric bulb, which was only turned on at mealtimes, “The inmate of the ‘hole’ was therefore kept in almost continual darkness” (Tucker 1941, 219). It was in this cell that Hyde was destined to spend the rest of his natural life; however, he had been given a Bible from the Salvation Army, who after a few days started to sing to Hyde. These singers were “bringing something that he could hold onto. Yes, even in the dark.” In particular, there was one song that he wanted to hear and begged them to sing it again:

“Sing that last line again, won’t you, please?” begged Hyde.

His wish was granted, and then the army squad faced up the corridor and marched away to the stirring chords of:

“No, never alone, alone No, never alone,

He has promised never to leave thee, Never to leave thee alone.”

“Never alone,” echoed Hyde, and then this once mighty boss whose word had been law to myriad followers fell down upon his knees, grasped the iron bars of the cell and tried to pray (Twiford 1941, 223-224).

In the chapter from which the above quote comes, it is the play of ‘darkness’ and ‘light’ that are important, because Twiford was writing from a Christian context, and in a sense, Hyde is similar to the figure of Saul of Tarsus (the Church Father Paul) on the road to Damascus receiving illumination from God and changing his life. When his old nemesis, the Separatist leader Robert Truman, visited Hyde, Truman removed him from the cell and ordered him taken to the prison hospital, berating the warden with the words, “‘Are you a man or a beast?.., Look,’ commanded Robert, pointing at Hyde. ‘Only a beast could treat a human being like that. Get this man out of here,’ he thundered” (Twiford 1941, 240). This quote echoes the white nationalist belief that while whites may be ‘barbarians’ at heart, they are not cruel and are morally superior to their opponents.

Hyde’s final ‘disenchantment’ with Cosmocracy came when he was lying in the prison hospital with Robert Truman, the man he had tried to kill on numerous occasions sitting by his bed. “Hyde frankly laid bare the secret plans of the world Cosmocracy. Then the repentant prisoner made his last plea. He begged Robert to be allowed to die for his country, as he felt hat that was the only way by which he could atone. He insisted that he be granted this opportunity to lay down his life for, he said, “the man who was once my bitterest enemy but who has now proven my best friend, in fact the only friend I have on earth” (Twiford 1941, 241). As so often happens in white nationalist novels, redemption is followed by atonement, meaning the

redemptive ‘prodigal’ white has to atone for his or her past actions by their death, preferably by taking racial enemies with them. For Felix Hyde, the end came in a cave in the Yucatan, where the “yellow” armies had stored a vast amount of munitions and supplies:

“I am talking to you, Robert. You are now viewing the passageway in the great underground storehouse of the yellow armies on the northeast tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. The officers who are looking for me will soon intercept this message and will come. Before they do so I want to say good-by to you, Robert, to Ragor and Pat [the other Separatist leaders] and all the rest of you. And may God bless you!”

As the last words died away the heavy fall of racing footsteps was heard coming down the passageway, and then a stern command to the spy to “Throw up your hands!” echoed down the corridor.

But the spy did not put up his hands. Instead he quickly drew his pistol and fired into the open G. N. D.

[“an ultrapowerful explosive”—sic, similar to Semtex, as described in the novel]. A mighty flash lit up the screen before the eyes of Robert and Ragor, then all was dark (Twiford 1941, 246-247).

Hyde’s sacrifice is a logical outcome of his wish for atonement for his sins against, not only his country but the white race. Twiford wrote his novel within the typical ‘old-time’ white supremacist discourse that was fairly common in the first four decades of the twentieth-century among the ‘hard right’ of the Protestant movement in the United States.¹³⁷ Hence, his approach to the problems of race echo certain Progressive or 2^nd Era Ku Klux Klan beliefs in Protestant Christianity and a concentration on salvation through sacrifice, which reinforces the ideas stated in the previous subchapter on ‘winning by losing.’ Also, Felix Hyde’s sacrifice, like Jeff Huxton’s in the Avalon colony on Mars in the last subchapter, allows the white race to survive.

Reinforcing this point is the concept of changing the system from within or racially aware whites working within American society and being allowed their ideologies and lives by the system; in essence, taking the best that America has to offer, at least in material possessions, and remaining loyal to one’s race—the white race, in the writings of the authors. The current American fascination with the ‘nanny’ state and its accoutrements has been a topic of not only white nationalist, but also libertarian and TEOTWAWKI novels. While not necessarily white nationalist in tone, meaning the novel does not necessarily approach race from a white nationalist perspective, Nathan W. Tucker’s 2013 novel Letters from Cell No. 73 approaches the idea of American society’s infatuation with ‘statism,’ when the main character, Colonel Peter Iossi, states in Letter VI:

Tragically, there were precious few politicians who talked about liberty anymore in America.

Instead of worshipping individual freedom, the religion in the birthplace of modern democracy was the god of statism. Rather than relying on Providence, man turned to the state for his daily bread. The only sacrifice

137 See Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1983) for more information on the milieu of the old, ‘hard’

Protestant right.

required was national suicide-the exchange of rights for handouts, liberty for domestication, responsibility for nannyism.

This new god, however, was not a franchise of any particular political party. Both Republicans and Democrats worshipped at the altar of the state, believing in its saving power for mankind. Political elections became a religious festival of state worship in which competing political saviors offered us earthly salvation in return for genuflection (Tucker 2013, 48).

The all too often heard lament that the country ‘is not what it used to be’ or that ‘our’ country is not ‘ours’ anymore among white nationalists and other like-oriented groups is seen in the above quote. In essence, both libertarians and white nationalists believe that statism or ‘nannyism’ has been the downfall of the country and that the WASP work ethic should be reinstated throughout the country’s morals, instead of people relying on ‘handouts’ from the government. Col. Peter Iossi believed in the principles of the United States, as did the hero of 1988’s A Candidate for the Order by Michael A. Hoffman II, John Schmidt, a former university literature professor who tried to work within the system, only to be betrayed by the system he fervently believed in. In the novel, while John Schmidt had been trained by a white nationalist teacher in the Classics and various forbidden philosophies, he tried to work within the system to live a normal life, however, he was fired from his job as a college professor when he ran afoul of his superiors as he started to question certain truths—mainly involving the Holocaust and Jewish domination of American culture. In a conversation with a reporter who wanted to report on the story of Schmidt’s children being attacked by neighborhood thugs, who were black, white (described as a ‘whigger’ in the novel) and Asian, Schmidt lays out his philosophy of who is to blame for the present lack of decency and morality in American society:

“There’s a funny quality to reality which I’ve noticed […] It’s that facts don’t go away just because the media and the academy have built up an elaborate attack on them. The bottom line is: What if there were Jewish plots and conspiracies? Should I fail to investigate them and if necessary expose them just because you gentlemen of the fourth estate deny their reality? I’m sorry, but your profession doesn’t carry that kind of weight with me. I was brought up to question authority and where reality comes into conflict with the System’s ‘Chosen People’ I opt for reality (Hoffman 1988, 48).

This bit of a conversation reinforces the point that white nationalists have been making for several decades, mainly that the cultural discourse refuses to acknowledge their right to be heard without being shouted down for being ‘racist’ or ‘anti-Semitic.’ With the victory of political correctness, in particular, and the recent controversies over the flying of the Confederate battle flag, the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement and Dylann Roof’s murder of nine blacks at a Charleston church in 2015, the culture seems to be vehemently against any acknowledgement of white nationalist attitudes or expression of its ideology. Furthermore, the ideology itself appears

to have been defeated in the cultural arena, which only reinforces the sense of victimization among white nationalists. In his encounter with a childhood friend, turned white nationalist revolutionary and member of white revolutionary organization known as the Order, John Schmidt desperately tries to reason that working within the system is a better alternative to mayhem and racial revolution:

Schmidt answered him in kind, “And you were always a hothead, Brent [Bane] and that’s not a good side of anybody. If anything, you and your band of crazies are destroying our chances to convince people that our cause is just.

The Order commander folded his arms on his chest and stood with his legs apart, like an oak tree anchored to the living room floor. “How’s so, Schmidt?”

“Because the friggin’ System is everywhere pushing the image of the White Man as moral leper, hatemonger and gas chamber baby-killer and you and your gang just help the New York Times and the other

“Because the friggin’ System is everywhere pushing the image of the White Man as moral leper, hatemonger and gas chamber baby-killer and you and your gang just help the New York Times and the other