Nut mix
KENNETH ALLSOP
'Martin Luther Coon, Traitor,' reads the ban- ner. It is 'Fire Your Nigger' Week. Across the amplifier system comes the catchy melody of a 45 rpm single by Odis Cochran and the Three Bigots, We is Nonviolent Niggers, which goes : Ah's dat Sammy Davis cat, Ah's a coon aristocrat! Ah ain't no common jigaboo, Ah's a kosher, nigger Jew.
(chorus) We're nonviolent niggers, peace-loving brothers, De white folks better love us, or we're gonna kill them rotten mothers!
A sing-along of Tilbury dockers and Smithfield bummarees? Or a spontaneous demonstration in support of some professor of Greek? No, these sentiments flower in country swampier yet than Westminster or Wolverhampton : these particular ones were the inspiration of Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi party, who, it will be recalled, preceded Martin Luther King as a stopper of lead, thereby cur- tailing his personal certainty of the presidency by 1972.
A massive, commanding ex-naval pilot, per- manently clad in wrap-around sun glasses as protection against the acid he was always ex- pecting to be thrown, he had his limitations as a charmer. In his office was a bust of Adolf Hitler set in a shrine with lighted candles, the doormat was a Jewish altar cloth, and the pet mongrel of his jackbooted storm-troopers had the affectionate name of Gas Chambers. Among Rockwell's publications was a pamphlet en- titled The Diary of Anne Fink, containing such cartoons as a skeletal prisoner being shovelled into an oven, captioned: 'I asked for a cheap pad, but this is ridiculous.'
Armed with a strong stomach and apparently indefatigable cool, George Thayer spent a year rummaging through these dustbins and sewers of American political extremism. He seems to be that rarity, the activist-scholar, who has vivified his academic research with sorties into the public arena and the secret think-tank to study his specimens at war and play. Before interviewing- Grand Dragon James Jones of the Ku Klux Klan he was frisked for tape- recorder, and as he left one of the sportier brothers said : 'I'm going downstairs too. I'll take the elevator, you can take the shaft,' amid general boisterous laughter. Before gaining access to James Madole, National Renaissance party fiihrer, he was interrogated by the fiihrer's white-haired mother, who conversa- tionally remarked: 'When I go into restaurants after Jews it looks like pigs ate there.' Rock- well himself explained how he would deal with the immigrant problem (black or white scum): `I'd gas 'em as they came down the gangplank.' To penetrate the Black Muslim stronghold, Mr Thayer went up to Harlem and sat in a crowded meeting hall feeling hideously, glaringly albino, while the speaker promised delivery of 500 carbines to the zestful plaudits of 'Get whitey, boy!'
Mr Thayer has organised his survey in gradations of poisonousness, moving from the noxious to the mild, that is from the mad-dog ultra right, Black Power nationalism and revolutionary left across to constitution conser- vative intellectuals of the Buckley brand and the New Left and peaceniks. We should not, of course, in Britain feel either superior or inadequate—according to how you view this riCh boskiness of flora in the American politi- cal badlands—for we have our own mutant growth. The electoral flings of, say, Shirley Temple and Earl Browder should not cloud our memory of our native Screaming Lord Sutch, Cornwall separatists and Funny Money candidates. Every general election gongs forth the flaming individualist as well as the group- kooks. But indisputably the United States has —as should the Beulah Land of free enter- prise—the greatest range of choice. In this supermarket of apocalyptical creeds there is something for everyone, whatever his prejudice, kink or crackpottery.
Mr Thayer scores by the calm, laconic ob- jectivity he maintains, equally when addressing himself to the relatively rational reformist and to the undiluted arsenical. He meticulously dis- tinguishes between what the John Birch Society cares to see as its 'warmhearted main-street vigilantism' and the National Review wing, literate, sophisticated and subtle in its crusade against state interference. As he presses on through the ranks of the Greenback party (antigold and Jewish bankers), the Wobblies (the horny-handed syndicalist militants), the Progressive Labor party ('the Mao now crowd'), the Constitutional party (Tut A Cave Man In The Capitol,' its 1966 governorship slogan), the I Am Movement (abstainers from meat, onions, garlic, tobacco, card playing and sexual intercourse), the Silver Shirts (Tor Christ and the Constitution,' and pledged to defranchise Jews), STENCH (standing for the Society to Ex- terminate Neo-Communist Harbingers), Fight- ing Homefolks of Fighting Men (confined to Glenwood Springs, Colorado), the Liberal Lobby (opposed to federal-aided education, tax- supported housing and socialised medicine), the Spartacists (breakaway Trotskyites, 'Every dime buys a bullet') and the Tax Cut party (they advocate giving Mao Tse-tung 'and his bar- barian gang' thirty days to surrender at Hong Kong), specific consistent traits may be de- tected.
For a start, these factions attempt to corn- pensate for their midgetiness by issuing edicts, and indeed speaking, in capital letters. FINAL DEATH NOTICE OF OUR REPUBLIC, boom their battlecries, and GOD BLESS IAN SMITH, PATRIOT AND HERO. During the Dirty Speech Movement at Berkeley, a demonstrator paraded with a large sign saying FUCK. He was speedily arrested. Within hours a FUCK DEFENSE COM- mirree had been formed.
What is common to most on the right polarity is an old-fashioned, cornpone, preach- in'-style fundamentalism, American as blue- berry pie and just as crusty. So many of these splinter groups share a pop-eyed apoplexy about roughly the same menaces that, com- bined, you might imagine,, they could form quite a battering-ram; but, it goes without say- ing, they are not cohesive or cooperative by nature. Communism, theological modernism, fluoridation, 'right to loaf' bills, do-goodism, one-worldism are all causes with their grass roots in such venerable New World folk move- ments as the Barn-Burners, Townsendites and America Firsters. Obtaining through the entire range is what Richard Hofstadter earlier, de- fined in The Paranoid Style in American Politics as 'a central image of a vast and sinister conspiracy . . . the big leap from. the undeniable to the unbelievable.' Mr Thayer's point about the Birchers, for instance, is that their global vision is 'wholly conspiratorial. They believe that they live in a world in which they are spied upon, plotted against, persecuted, betrayed and undoubtedly destined for total ruin.'
It is not hard to build up an identikit por- trait of a single, all-purpose bogeyman against whom these disarray dissenters could vent their
hate in a great canalised catharsis, like the Goldstein screen show in 1984. He would be a Jewish-Negro of the Catholic faith speaking in lisping homosexual syllables in support of de Gaulle and Ho Chi Minh at the UN.
Does the non-mainstream office-seeker stand any realistic chance of power against the two- party machines? Looking at Wallace on the one hand and the meteoric career of Eugene McCarthy on the other, it is clear that there is room for the aberrant. Yet when it comes to hard vote-casting the results are more often like those given to Jesse Stoner, organiser of the Anti-Jew Week, who, when running for Congress in 1948, polled 500 out of the 30,000 cast.
Nevertheless, I feel that Mr Thayer's civilised forbearance errs on the side of inertia. Remark- ing that 'America has never been a particularly tolerant place,' he bends in all directions urging that these minorities should not cursorily be labelled 'lunatic fringe,' not be thought to be 'less intelligent and less capable than the more "normal" political moderates.'
Many, he observes aptly in G. K. Chester- ton's words, 'glow with the memory of to- morrow afternoon.' But so liberally anxious is he to ensure that free speech is not infringed that he goes no further on the subject of assassination and sniping psychopaths than to concede : 'Perhaps some gun legislation is needed.' This might seem overly egalitarian and indulgently passive in the face of White House pickets with placards demanding 'GAS RED JEW SPYS,' propaganda sheets headed 'KILL Him! KILL HIM!' and white bullyboys and black messiahs with their blood-hazed faith invested not in ballots but bullets.
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