Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

By 1986, reports had begun surfacing of large quantities of military equipment, including weapons and explosives, disappearing from major installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina. High-ranking government officials recognized the problem of white power activists within the ranks of the armed forces but often failed to include more covert forms of participation. Groups such as White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) amassed vast stockpiles of high-grade weapons that were used in several murders, robberies, and attempted bombings. The Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK) received training and equipment from active-duty soldiers as part of an effort to establish a “‘United State of Carolina’ or ‘white Southland’” (142). Different groups traded money for equipment, such as weapons or computers. Military personnel could often check out weapons, ostensibly for training purposes, and never return them. Individual soldiers were sometimes caught and convicted, but the US government “did not yet grasp the nature of the threat posed by the white power movement, seeing disconnected paramilitary hate groups instead of a cohesive movement dedicated to antigovernment guerrilla war” (146).

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a prominent anti-extremist group, scored a major victory against the white power movement by championing the suit of Bobby Pearson, a Black prison guard who became the subject of intense harassment after seeking a promotion. The SPLC painted a full picture of the North Carolina Klan’s operations and ambitions, and pointed to a pledge their leader, Glenn Miller, had made to cease paramilitary activity. The case helped shed light on the alliance between certain soldiers and the white power movement, but again the government failed to acknowledge the scope of the problem. Even as the SPLC-sponsored trial was underway, 134 Marines and weapons dealers were convicted of trafficking weapons. Following his conviction, Miller vanished, leaving behind a declaration of war and demanding a reversal of his conviction and cash payment, or else he would unleash his “eight teams of freedom fighters prepared to start a race war nationwide” (153). Miller was eventually tracked down and apprehended, and he accepted a five-year sentence and later placement in the witness protection program in exchange for testimony against his former associates.

In 1987, the federal government undertook its most significant prosecution yet against the white power movement, an effort that resulted in utter failure. According to Belew, the Fort Smith trial emphasizes the critical role of women in the white power movement, despite its militant and masculinist ethos. The alleged vulnerability of white women served as a vital point of linkage between the movement itself and its mainstream sympathizers. As women sought equal treatment in the workplace, and the advent of Roe v. Wade and greater access to birth control made it much easier for women to pursue a life outside of marriage and motherhood, the white power movement looked to traditional female roles as a major line of defense against a “Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG) [that] wanted to abort white babies, admit immigrants, allow people of color to have unlimited children on the government’s welfare dime, allow black men to rape white women, and encourage interracial marriages” (159). Some white power activists even advocated polygamy to accelerate the reproduction of white children, and looked for locations within the United States “they believed they could realistically seize, populate, and defend” (161). The Pacific Northwest seemed most amenable for being large, sparsely populated, and mostly white, reviving fantasies of “the cowboy and the woman pioneer” settling a frontier (162). This would be a new world, removed from a corrupt society, where women would rediscover the supposedly innate desire to be subservient wives and dutiful mothers.

Despite being pegged as fit only for only domesticity, and kept out of any leadership roles, women did perform vital roles within the white power movement, “contributing to the building and maintenance of social networks, recruitment, the production and circulation of family-oriented cultural products like recipes and homeschooling materials, and the social normalization of young activists” (167). Ironically, these roles frequently took them out of the home and into public engagement, to propound an antifeminist ideology. Women were also viewed as auxiliary forces in the battles to come, serving as nurses to the wounded and holding down the home front while the men went to battle. Devout motherhood was seen as a necessary quality for the coming apocalypse.

Having scored some minor victories against white power factions, the federal government sought to target the broad swath of their leadership, at last recognizing them as a coherent movement engaged in a conspiracy against the US government. On the eve of the trial, Louis Beam and his 20-year-old wife, Sheila, were in Mexico, and she shot a Mexican federal officer who had pulled them over. Beam turned this story into another example of white women under siege by both non-white predators and a federal government that lacked the will to protect its (white) citizens. This story made Sheila Beam sympathetic beyond the ranks of white power activists, and her presence at her husband’s trial may have swayed the jury. The federal government also made the mistake of holding the trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which was close to many important sites in the white power movement and therefore likely to have at least a few sympathetic jurors. A lack of coordination with the Mexican government rendered much of the evidence against Beam inadmissible. Two jurors began romantic relationships with defendants after the trial, raising profound questions about their impartiality, and on the witness stand, Beam and others proved charismatic speakers with well-rehearsed grievances that assuredly struck a chord with portions of their audience. Their acquittal marked a significant victory for the white power movement, and in 1992, the death of another white woman would spur them to make good on their promises of all-out war against the state.