Searchlight, October 2002

William Pierce, founder and leader of the neo-nazi National Alliance (NA) died on July 23, 2002. While Pierce's death leaves some doubt about the NA's future viability, the deceased leader seems to have made careful preparations to ensure the organisation's long-term survival. In this article, extracted from the Center for New Community's new report Beyond a Dead Man's Deeds: The National Alliance and William Pierce, Devin Burghart and Justin Massa look at the life of one of the world's most significant postwar white supremacists.

William Luther Pierce III was born on 11 September 1933 in Atlanta, Georgia. As a youth, he lived in Georgia, Virginia and Alabama. He attended public schools until his final two years of high school, during which he attended Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas.

Upon his graduation in 1951, he received a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University and took a job at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. He attended CalTech and then the University of Colorado in Boulder during his graduate studies, eventually receiving a doctorate in physics from the University of Colorado in 1962.

In 1962 Pierce accepted an assistant professorship at Oregon State University. That same year he joined his first political organisation, the John Birch Society. He would soon leave, frustrated with its lack of a position on "the Jewish question". According to Pierce, it was during this time that he began to correspond with American Nazi Party (ANP) leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Pierce and his wife moved to North Haven, Connecticut in 1965, where he worked as a senior research scientist at Pratt and Whitney Advanced Materials Research and Development Laboratory. This was his final job outside the movement.

Pierce began weekend visits to Washington DC to work at the ANP headquarters, eventually taking the unpaid position of editor of the fledgling ANP publication, The National Socialist World. He moved his family to Fredericksburg, Virginia, in early 1967.

After the death of Rockwell in August 1967 at the hands of a disgruntled follower, Pierce stayed with the group, which had changed its name to the National Socialist White People's Party, until 1970. Following a violent argument with the leadership, Pierce quit the organisation and stopped publishing The National Socialist World.

Shortly thereafter, Pierce joined the National Youth Alliance. This group was the spawn of Youth for Wallace, an organisation founded in 1968 by Willis Carto to rally support on college campuses for a presidential bid by the arch-segregationist George Wallace. After the election, Youth for Wallace was renamed the National Youth Alliance and continued its campus recruitment activities.

After a bitter power struggle between Carto and Pierce, the National Youth Alliance splintered in 1974. In an interview on 24 July Carto exclaimed, "I started the Youth for Wallace. After the election, the Youth for Wallace head Louis Byers, he took the mailing list and went to Pierce and made a deal. That's where the National Youth Alliance came from, then Pierce changed the name." Pierce incorporated a new organisation, the National Alliance, on 26 February 1974. Carto would go on to form the Liberty Lobby, whose tabloid, The Spotlight, had more than 300,000 subscribers in the 1980s. Carto also founded the influential Holocaust denial outfit, the Institute for Historical Review.

Pierce began publishing a weekly tabloid, Attack! (which later changed its name to National Vanguard). From 1975 to 1978, the tabloid serialised what would become his most famous book, The Turner Diaries, which has now sold nearly half a million copies. The pulp novel is the fictional account of Earl Turner, a member of an underground white supremacist organisation that starts a race war and then conquers much of North America. It was published in book form by the Alliance in 1978. Perhaps most notable as the inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Pierce's book has influenced numerous acts of racist terror around the globe.

Pierce would later explain his rationale for writing the book. "In 1975, when I began writing The Turner Diaries ... I wanted to take all of the feminist agitators and propagandists and all of the race-mixing fanatics and all of the media bosses and all of the bureaucrats and politicians who were collaborating with them, and I wanted to put them up against a wall, in batches of a thousand or so at a time, and machine-gun them. And I still want to do that. I am convinced that one day we will have to do that before we can get our civilisation back on track, and I look forward to the day." (ADV broadcast, 29 March 1997.)

The First General Convention of the National Alliance was held on 2-3 September 1978 in Arlington, Virginia. The speakers were William Pierce, Ted O'Keefe, and Mark Weber. Today O'Keefe and Weber run the Institute for Historical Review.

Also in 1978, Pierce began holding weekly meetings of the Cosmotheist Community Church, a religion of his own creation that promoted white supremacy. Later that year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) denied tax-exempt status for the National Alliance, rejecting Pierce's July 1977 claim that the organisation was "educational". He received tax-exempt status for his "Church" in 1983, but in 1986 the IRS revoked it for all but 60 acres of the property that were to be used solely for "religious purposes".

At the National Alliance's Fourth General Convention held on 5-6 September 1981, Tom Martinez (a future member of the neo-nazi terror group, The Order) conducted a workshop on street sales and public distribution of National Alliance material.

Another National Alliance member, Robert Mathews, developed a neo-nazi terror cell dubbed The Order, based on the inner circle of racist revolutionaries in The Turner Diaries. After a series of dramatic crimes including murders, armoured car robberies, counterfeiting and bombings, Mathews was killed in a confrontation with federal officers.

For $95,000, Pierce purchased a large farm near Mill Point, West Virginia, in 1985. It has been suggested that some of the money came from The Order.

Following the election of President Ronald Reagan, Alliance membership declined in the early 1980s. Pierce continued to build a membership and activist base for the National Alliance, constructed an infrastructure within his West Virginia compound and expanded the Alliance's influence throughout the movement.

In 1987, Pierce created a media stir when he purchased 100 shares in AT&T and used them to make stockholder proposals calling for an end to business ties with Israel. Although reintroduced numerous times, the proposal always failed.

The National Alliance's publishing company, National Vanguard Books, was created in 1988. In 1989 it printed Pierce's second novel, Hunter, which features assassinations of interracial couples, Jews and politicians. Hunter opens with the main character, Oscar Yeager, quietly sitting in his van awaiting an interracial couple, his first victims. With a smooth motion, Yeager reaches under a blanket on the seat next to him and brings a rifle to his shoulder. He braces himself and squeezes off two shots. He sees the couple's skulls explode into a shower of bone fragments, brain tissue and blood, before calmly driving away. The book is dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, convicted of the sniper murders of two African-American men.

Pierce would later tell his biographer that he deliberately crafted Hunter as a motivational tool for individual assassins. "From the beginning with Hunter, I had this idea of how fiction can work as a teaching tool in mind" (Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, p240). The book is also in part a response to an ongoing reevaluation of movement weaknesses. Like The Turner Diaries, it has inspired several real-life acts of racist terror.

The beginning of the 1990s was marked by an expansion into new propaganda media. National Vanguard Books began publishing audio cassettes in 1991. That December, the National Alliance began broadcasting a shortwave radio programme, American Dissident Voices, worldwide. By early 1992, several AM stations were carrying the programme. To attract a younger audience, the National Alliance published its first comic book, The Saga of White Will, in February 1993.

When a Ryder truck filled with ammonium nitrate fertiliser and fuel detonated in front of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, Pierce and the National Alliance were thrust into the national spotlight. The bombing, which took the lives of 168 people, was modelled on The Turner Dairies, a book that the bomber, Tim McVeigh, had peddled through the gun-show circuit in the years before.

On 11 November 1995, Pierce travelled to London to address the British National Party. Despite a relationship of long standing between the National Alliance leader and John Tyndall, the BNP leader (who had visited the National Alliance headquarters as early as 3 July 1979), this was the first time Pierce had addressed the BNP. According to Searchlight, chants of "Free the Order" broke out throughout the crowd of 150 neo-Nazis during Pierce's speech. Although they differ strategically (the National Alliance favouring vanguard cadre-building, while the BNP has chosen the electoral road), the two organisations continue to be close. After this visit, Pierce was officially banned from England.

Pierce experienced a setback in 1996, when the Southern Poverty Law Center won an $85,000 judgment against him for his role in a scheme to keep Church of the Creator assets away from the family of a murdered African-American man.

In summer 1999, Pierce acquired a valuable youth outreach arm when he took control of the largest white power music distributor in the United States. To quell dissent among older members, Pierce wrote, "As Resistance Records regains strength, that acquisition should add an increasing number of younger members, in the 18-25 age range, to our ranks". Pierce was right. The number of young people in his organisation has swelled dramatically and the National Alliance now maintains hegemony in the white power youth music scene.

The acquisition also brought Pierce closer to the German neo-nazi political party, the NPD. According to the German magazine Antifaschistische INFO-Blatt, Pierce travelled to Germany that autumn to solidify business arrangements and attend the NPD conference.

Throughout most of the organisation's history, the National Alliance steered clear of public rallies - leaving those events to robed Ku Klux Klan members and assorted "right-wing hobbyists" - because of the risk of personal exposure and the inefficacy of the events. Instead, under Pierce's control, the organisation sought to "build a revolutionary infrastructure". In other words, it worked to train dedicated cadres of activists outside the public eye.

The rapid expansion of the National Alliance in the late 1990s led to a transformation of organising structure. Encouraged internally by staff members such as Billy Roper, the deputy membership coordinator, in the past 18 months the National Alliance has begun a transition from cadre-style groupings to mass-base organising. One of the first indicators of such a transition was the use of public rallies.

There have been five National Alliance rallies in Washington DC in the past year. Two earlier rallies were held in front of the German embassy to show solidarity with the German neo-nazi party, the NPD. Additional antisemitic demonstrations have been outside the Israeli embassy. In addition, National Alliance members have held several smaller rallies and public events around the country.

These events marked a growing organisational cooperation between the violent Hammerskin Nation and the National Alliance, and their affiliated labels Panzerfaust (Hammerskins) and Resistance (National Alliance). At the behest of Erich Gliebe, Panzerfaust joined the National Alliance in pulling out of the recent Klan-controlled NordicFest.

by Devin Burghart and Justin Massa in Chicago

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