By Dr. William Pierce
On the
eighteenth of June, 1945, a little over six weeks after the death of Adolf
Hitler, Rudolf Hess wrote the following words in a letter to his wife, from his
prison cell:
You will readily
imagine how often during the last few weeks my thoughts have turned to the
years gone by: to this quarter of a century of history, concentrated for us in
one name and full of the most wonderful human experiences. History is not
ended. It will sooner or later take up the threads apparently broken off
forever and knit them together in a new pattern. The human element is no more
and lives only in memory. Very few people have been privileged, as we were, to
participate from the very beginning in the growth of a unique personality,
through joy and sorrow, hope and trouble, love and hate, and all the
manifestations of greatness, and further, in all the little indications of
human weakness, without which a man is not truly worthy of love…
Even when one has been privileged to
witness the manifestations of greatness, it may be exceedingly difficult to
describe adequately in words those manifestations and thereby to paint a true
picture of a unique and great personality. When one has not the basis of a quarter-century
of participation in the growth of such a personality, but less than two years,
the task is especially difficult.30. His eulogy was short but moving It would be a vain hope, then, to expect the
pages which follow to reflect the true greatness of the man. That greatness
will be best reflected in the fruition of his life’s work in years to come.
Here, however, we can at least hope
to evoke an image of the man, imperfect and incomplete though it may be, which
will serve to inspire those National Socialists who did not have the privilege
of knowing him personally.
GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL was born on March 9, 1918, in Bloomington, a small coal-mining and
farming town in central Illinois. Both his parents were theatrical performers.
His father, George Lovejoy Rockwell, was a twenty-eight-year-old vaudeville
comedian of English and Scotch ancestry. His mother, born Claire Schade, was a
young German-French toe-dancer, part of a family dance team. His parents were
divorced when he was six years old, and he and a younger brother and sister
lived alternately with their mother and their father during the next few years.
The young Rockwell passed the
greater part of his boyhood days in Maine, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. His
father settled in a small coastal town in Maine, and Rockwell spent his summers
there; attending school in Atlantic City and, later, in Providence during the
winters. Some of his fondest memories in later years were of summer days spent
on the Maine beaches, or hiking in the Maine woods, or exploring the coves and
inlets of the Maine coast in his sailboat, which he built himself, starting
from an old skiff. Rockwell acquired what was to be a lifelong love of sailing
and the sea during those early years spent with his father in Maine.
Aside from a bit more traveling about
than the average child, it is difficult to find anything extraordinary in his
childhood environment. He lived in the midst neither great poverty nor great
wealth; he had an affectionate relationship with both his parents, despite
their divorce; he was a sound and healthy child, and there seems to be no
evidence of prolonged unhappiness or turmoil in his childhood. If he later
recalled with greater pleasure the times spent with his father than those spent
with his mother, this can be attributed either to the greater opportunities to
satisfy his youthful longing for adventure that life on the Maine coast offered
relative to that in the city, or to the fact that his mother lived with a
domineering sister of whom young Rockwell was not fond.
And yet, even as a boy he displayed
those qualities of character which were later to set him off from the common
run of men. His most remarkable quality was his responsiveness to challenge. To
tell the boy Rockwell that a thing was impossible, that it simply could not be
done, was to awaken in him the irresistible determination to do it. He has
described an experience he had at the age of ten which illustrates this aspect
of his character.
A juvenile gang of some of the
tougher elements at the grammar school he was attending in an Atlantic City
coastal suburb had singled him out for hazing. He was informed that he was to
be given a cold dunking in the ocean, and that he should relax and submit
gracefully, as resistance would be futile. Instead of submitting, he ferociously
fought off the entire gang of his attackers on the beach, wildly striking out
with his fists and feet, clawing, biting, and gouging until the other boys
finally abandoned their aim of throwing him in the water and retire to nurse
their wounds.
Later, as a teenager, he found that
the challenge of a stormy sea affected him in much the same way as had the
challenge of the juvenile gang. When other boys brought their boats into dock
because the water was too rough, young Rockwell found his greatest pleasure in
sailing. He loved nothing better than to pit his strength and his skill against
the wild elements. As the wind and the waves rose so did his spirits Wrestling
with tiller and rigging in a tossing boat, drenched with spray and blasted by
fierce gusts, he would howl back at the wind in sheer animal joy.
This peculiar stubbornness of his
nature-call it a combative spirit, if you will-coupled with an absolute
physical fearlessness, which led him into many a dangerous and harebrained
escapade as a boy, gave him the willpower as a man to undertake without hesitation
ventures at which ordinary men quailed; throughout his life it led him to
choose the course of action which his reason and his sensibility told him to be
the right course regardless of the course those about him were taking;
ultimately it provided the driving force which led him to issue a challenge and
stand alone against a whole world, when it became apparent to him that that
world was on the wrong course. This trait provides the key to the man.
Two other characteristics he
displayed as a boy were an omnivorous curiosity and a stark objectivity. He
attributed his curiosity, as well as the artistic talents which he early
displayed, to his father, who also exhibited these traits, but the source of
his rebellious spirit and his indomitable will is harder to assign. They seem
to have been the product of a rare and fortuitous combination of genes, giving
rise to a nature markedly different from that of his immediate forebears.
He entered Brown University in the
fall of 1938, as a freshman. His major course of study was philosophy, but he
was also very interested in the sciences. He used the opportunity of staff work
on student periodicals to exercise his talents in drawing and creative writing.
In addition to his curricular, journalistic, and artistic activities, he also
found time for a substantial amount of skirt chasing and other collegiate
sports, including skiing and fencing; he became a member of the Brown
University fencing team.
While at Brown he had his first
head-on encounter with modern liberalism. He enrolled in a sociology course
with the naive expectation that, just as in his geology and psychology courses
he would learn the scientific principles underlying those two areas of human
knowledge, so in sociology would he learn some of the basic principles
underlying human social behavior.
He was disappointed and confused,
however, when it gradually became apparent to him that there was a profound
difference in the attitudes of sociologists and, say, geologists toward their
subjects. Whereas the authors of his geology textbooks were careful to point
out there were many things about the history and the structure of the earth
which were as yet unknown, or only imperfectly known, it was clear that there
were indeed fundamental ideas and well-established facts upon which the science
was based and that both his geology professor and the authors of geology
textbooks were sincerely interested in presenting these ideas and facts to the
student in an orderly manner, with the hope that he would thereby gain a better
understanding of the nature of the planet on which he lived.
In sociology, he found the basic
principles far more elusive. What was particularly disturbing to him, though,
was not so much the complexity of the concepts as the gnawing suspicion the
waters had been deliberately muddied. He redoubled his efforts to get to the
roots of the subject or, at least, to understand where the hints, innuendoes,
and roundabout promptings led: „I buried myself in my sociology books,
absolutely determined to find why I was missing the kernel of the thing.“
The equalitarian idea that the
manifest differences between the capabilities of individuals and between the
evolutionary development of various races can be accounted for almost wholly by
contemporary environmental effects-that there really are no inborn differences
in quality worth mentioning among human beings-was certainly one of the places
his sociology textbooks were leading:
I was bold enough to
ask Professor Bucklin if this were the idea, and he turned red in anger. I was
told it was impossible to make any generalizations, although all I was asking
for was the fundamental idea, if any, of sociology. I began to see that
sociology was different from any other course I had ever taken. Certain ideas
produced apoplexy in the teacher, particularly the suggestion that perhaps some
people were no-good biological slobs from the day they were born. Certain other
ideas, although they were never formulated and stated frankly, were fostered
and encouraged-and these were always ideas revolving around the total power of
environment.
Although he did not clearly
recognize it for what it was at that time, young Rockwell had partially
uncovered one of the most widely used tactics of the modern liberals. When the
clever liberal has as his goal miscegenation, say, he certainly does not just
blurt this right out. Instead he will write novels, produce television shows,
and film motion pictures which, subtly at first and then more and more boldly,
suggest that those who engage in sexual affairs with Negroes are braver,
better, more attractive people than those who don’t; and that opposition to
miscegenation is a vulgar and loutish perversion, certain evidence of being a
ridiculous square at best and a drooling, violent redneck at worst. But if one
tries to pin him down and asks him why he is in favor of miscegenation, he will
reply in a huff that that is not what he is aiming at at all, but only „justice,
or fairness,“ or „better understanding between the races.“
And so when Rockwell naively went
right to the heart of the matter in Professor Bucklin’s sociology class, he got
an angry reprimand. The racial equalitarians have gotten much bolder in the
last thirty years, but at that time Rockwell was merely aware that they wanted
him to accept certain ideas without actually those ideas out into the open
arena of free discussion where they would be subject to attack:
I still knew little or
nothing about communism or its pimping little sister, liberalism, but I could
not avoid the steady pressure, everywhere in the University, to accept the
ideas of massive human equality and the supremacy of environment.
Typically, this pressure resulted
not in acquiescence but in his determination to stand up for what seemed to him
to be reasonable and natural. He satirized the equalitarian point of view, not
only in his column in the student newspaper, but also in one of his sociology
examination papers! The nearly catastrophic consequences of this bit of
insolence taught him the prudence of holding his tongue under certain
circumstances.
As he began his junior year at
Brown, the alien conspiracy to use America as a tool to make the world safe for
Jewry was shifting its propaganda machine into high gear. National Socialist
Germany was portrayed as a nation of depraved criminals whose goal was the
enslavement of the world-including America. Hollywood, the big newspapers, and
his liberal professors - always the most noisily vocal action at any
university-all pushed the same line, unabashedly appealing to the naive
idealism of their audience: „Hitler must be stopped!“
And, like millions of other American
patriots, Lincoln Rockwell fell for the smooth lies and the clever swindle,
backed as they were by the authority of the head of the American government.
Neither he nor his millions of compatriots realized that the conspiracy had
reached into the White House, and that its occupant had sold his services to
the conspirators:
It is typical of my
political naivete of that time that when the propaganda about Hitler began to
be pushed upon us in large doses, I swallowed it all, unable even to suspect
that somebody might have an interest in all this, and that it might not be the
interest of the United States or our people… It became obvious that we would
have to get into the war to stop this ‘horrible ogre’ who planned to conquer
America so we were told, and so I believed.
Thus, in March, 1941, convinced that
America was in mortal danger from „the Nazi aggressors,“ Rockwell left his
comfortable life at the university and offered his services to his country’s
armed forces. Shortly after enlisting in the United States Navy, he received an
appointment as an Aviation Cadet and began flight training at Squantum,
Massachusetts. He received his first naval commission, as an ensign, on
December 9, 1941 - two days after the Pearl Harbor attack. He served as a naval
aviator throughout World War II, advancing from the rank of ensign to
lieutenant and winning several decorations. He commanded the naval air support
during the American invasion of Guam, in July and August, 1944. He was promoted
to lieutenant commander in October, 1945, and shortly thereafter returned to
civilian life, where he hoped to make a career for himself as an artist.
While still in the navy, he had
married a girl he had known as a student at Brown University. The marriage was
not a particularly happy one, although it was destined to last more than ten
years.
The first five years after leaving
the navy were spent as an art student, a commercial photographer, a painter, an
advertising executive, and a publisher, in Maine and in New York. Then in 1950,
with the outbreak of war in Korea, Lieutenant Commander Rockwell returned to
active duty with the United States Navy and was assigned to train fighter pilots
in southern California. There almost by chance, the political education of
thirty-two-year-old Lincoln Rockwell began.
It was in 1950 that Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s investigations into subversive activities and treasonous behavior on
the part of a number of United States government employees and officials began
to receive wide public notice. Rockwell, like every honest citizen, was
horrified and angered by these disclosures of treachery. But he was puzzled as
much as he was shocked by the violent, hysterical, and vicious reaction to
these disclosures which came from a certain segment of the population. Why were
so many persons-and, especially, so many in the public-opinion-forming
media-frantically determined to silence McCarthy and, failing that, to smear and
discredit him?
McCarthy was an American with a
distinguished record. A war hero, like Rockwell he had entered his country’s
armed forces as an enlisted man and emerged as a much-decorated officer. He had
won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his combat performance in World War II.
Now that he was flushing from cover the rats who had sold out the vital
interests of the country for which he had fought, Rockwell could not understand
why any responsible and loyal citizen should seek to defame the man or block
his courageous efforts:
I began to pay
attention, in my spare time, to what it was all about. I read McCarthy speeches
and pamphlets and found them factual, instead of the wild nonsense which the
papers charged was his stock-in-trade. I became aware of a terrific slant in
all the papers against Joe McCarthy, although I still couldn’t imagine why.
At this time an acquaintance gave
Rockwell some anti-Communist tracts to read. One of the things he immediately
noticed about them was their strongly anti-Semitic tone. Although manifest
public evidence obliged him to agree with some of the charges made by the
authors of these tracts-for example, that there were extraordinarily
disproportionate numbers of Jews both among McCarthy’s attackers and among the
subversives his investigations were unearthing-he found many of their claims
too far-fetched to be credible. In particular, the charge that communism was a
Jewish, not a Russian, movement seemed ridiculous when Rockwell considered the
fact that Jews were so firmly entrenched in capitalistic enterprises and always
had been; capitalism, supposedly the deadly enemy of communism, was the
traditional Jewish sphere of influence.
One anti-Communist tabloid went so
far as to cite various items of documentary evidence in support of its
seemingly wild claims, and Rockwell decided to call its bluff by looking into
this „evidence“ for himself. On his next off-duty day he went to the public
library in San Diego, and what he found there changed the course of his
life-and will yet change the course of world history. In his own words: „Down
there in the dark stacks of the San Diego Public Library, I got my awakening
from thirty years of stupid political sleep... “
Rockwell was staggered by the
evidence he uncovered in the library; it left no doubt, for instance, that what
had been described in his school textbooks as the „Russian“ Revolution was
instead a Jewish orgy of genocide against the Russian people. He even found
that in their own books and periodicals the Jews boasted more-or-less openly of
the fact! In a Jewish biographical reference work entitled Who’s Who in
American Jewry he found a number of prominent Bolsheviks proudly listed, although
by no stretch of the imagination could they be considered Americans. Among them
were Lazar Kaganovitch, the Butcher of the Ukraine, and Leon Trotsky (Lev
Bronstein), the bloodthirsty Commissar of the Red Army, who was given credit in
the book for liquidating „counter-revolutionary forces“ in Russia.
Another book, written by a prominent
„English“ Jew, boasted that „the Jews to a greater degree than . . . any other
ethnic group . . . have been the artisans of the Revolution of 1917.“ An
estimate was given in the book that „80% of the revolutionaries in Russia were
Jews.“
Musty back issues of Jewish
newspapers told the same story, and they were backed up by official U.S.
government records. One volume of such records, which had been published twenty
years previously, contained ministerial reports from Russia of brutal frankness.
Typical of the material in these records was the following sentence written by
the Dutch diplomatic official, Oudendyk, in a 1918 report to his government
from Russia:
I consider that the
immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the World,
not even excluding the war which is still raging, and unless as above stated
Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately it is bound to spread in one form
or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and worked by
Jews who have no nationality; and whose one object is to destroy for their own
ends the existing order of things.
Shocking as were these revelations,
Rockwell was even more disturbed by the fact that the general public was
oblivious to them. Why were these things not in school history text? Why was he
told over and over again by the radio and newspapers and magazines of Adolf
Hitler’s „awful crime“ in killing so many Jews, but never told that the Jews in
Russia were responsible for the murder of a vastly larger number of Gentiles?
Other questions presented
themselves. He had been told that England’s attack on Germany was justified by
Hitler’s attack on Poland. But what of the Soviet Union, which had invaded
Poland at the same time? Why no English declaration of war against the Soviet
Union? Could it be because the government there was in Jewish hands? Who was
responsible for the conspiracy of silence on these and other questions? He
grimly resolved to find out. And, later, as the facts gradually fitted into place
and the whole, sordid picture began to emerge, he saw before him an inescapable
obligation.
An honest man, when he becomes aware
that some dirty work is afoot in his community, will speak out against it and
attempt to rouse his neighbors into doing the same. What if he finds, though,
that most of his neighbors do not want to be bothered; that many of his
neighbors are already aware of what is afoot but prefer to ignore it because to
oppose it might jeopardize their private affairs; that some of his neighbors-
some of his ,wealthiest and most influential neighbors, the leaders of the
community-are themselves engaged in the dirty work? If he is an ordinary man,
he may grumble for a while about such a sorry state of affairs, but he will
adapt himself as best he can to it. He will soon see there is nothing to be
gained by sticking his neck out, and he will go on about his business.
Human nature being what it is, he
will very likely ease his conscience by trying to forget as rapidly as possible
what he has learned; perhaps he will even convince himself eventually that
there is really nothing wrong after all-that his initial judgement was in
error, and that the dirty work was really not dirty work but merely „progress.“
If, on the other hand, he is an extraordinary man with a particularly strong
sense of duty, he will continue to oppose what he knows to be wrong and bound
to work evil for the community in the long run. He may continue to point out to
his neighbors, even after they have made it clear that they are not interested,
that the dirty work should be stopped; he may write pamphlets and deliver
speeches; he may even run for public office on a „reform“ ticket.
But even so, being a reasonable man
and no „extremist,“ he will feel himself obliged to give the malefactors the
benefit of the doubt which must surely exist as to their motives. And perhaps
their position is, indeed, not wholly wrong? Surely, some sort of reasonable
compromise which will be fair to all concerned is the best solution. If the
evildoer had been working alone when discovered, hanging would, of course, be
the only admissible solution to the problem: a fitting and total repudiation by
the community of his evil deeds. But when so many criminals, with so many
accomplices, have been engaged for so long in such an extensive undertaking and
have already done such profound damage, surely the most reasonable solution
must be just to admonish the criminals-if, indeed, it is fair to call them
criminals-try to install a few safeguards against their renewed activity – safeguards
which, to be sure, would not be too grossly inconsistent with the „progress“
(or was it damage?) already wrought – and then, letting bygones be bygones, try
to live with things as they are.
But, it is only one man out of tens
of millions – the rare and lonely world-historical figure – who has, first, the
objectivity to evaluate such a situation in terms of absolute and timeless
standards and, unswayed by popular and contemporary considerations of „reasonableness,“
to draw the ultimate conclusions which those standards dictate; and who then
has the strength of will and character to insist that there must be no
compromise with evil, that it must be rooted out and utterly destroyed, that
right and health and sanity must again prevail, regardless of the commotion and
temporary unpleasantness involved in restoring them.
Rockwell had seen the facts. To him,
it was unthinkable to attempt to wriggle away from the conclusion they implied.
And, as he realized the frightening magnitude of the task before him, instead
of attempting to excuse himself from the responsibility which his new knowledge
carried with it, he felt rising within him his characteristic response to a
seemingly impossible challenge.
It was a straightforward sense of
commitment which had led him to volunteer for military service in March, 1941,
as soon as he had been tricked into believing that Adolf Hitler was a threat to
his country, instead of waiting for Pearl Harbor. And in early 1951, when he
began to understand that he had been tricked in 1941 and when he began to see
who had tricked him and what they were up to and the terrible damage they had
done to his people and were yet planning to do, that same sense of commitment
left only one course open to him, namely, to fight! He did not stop to ask
whether others were also willing to shoulder their responsibility; his own was
perfectly clear to him.
But how to fight? Where to begin?
What to do? The name of one man who had done something naturally came to his
mind: Adolf Hitler. Rockwell has described what happened next:
I hunted around the
San Diego bookshops and finally found a copy of Mein Kampf hidden away in the
rear. I bought it, took it home, and sat down to read. And that was the end of
one Lincoln Rockwell… and the beginning of an entirely different person.
He had not, of course, spent nearly
thirty-three years completely oblivious to world events. Many things had
bothered him deeply, and he had spent years of frustrating effort trying to
fathom the apparently meaningless chaos into which the world seemed to be
descending. It seemed to him that there must be some logical relationship
between the events of the preceding few decades, but he could not find the key
to the puzzle:
I simply suffered from
the vague, unhappy feeling that things were wrong – I didn’t know exactly how –
and that there must be a way of diagnosing the disease and its causes and
making intelligent, organized efforts to correct that something wrong.
Adolf Hitler’s message in Mein Kampf
gave him the key he had been seeking, and more:
In Mein Kampf I found
abundant mental sunshine, which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear
light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence
stabbed into the darkness like thunderclaps and lightning bolts of revelation,
tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness,
brilliantly illuminating the mysteries of the heretofore impenetrable murk in a
world gone mad.
I was transfixed,
hypnotized. I could not lay the book down without agonies of impatience to get
back to it. I read it walking to the squadron; I took it into the air and read
it lying on the chart board while I automatically gave the instructions to the
other planes circling over the desert. I read it crossing the Coronado ferry. I
read it into the night and the next morning. When I had finished I started
again and reread every word, underlining and marking especially magnificent
passages. I studied it; I thought about it; I wondered at the utter,
indescribable genius of it...
I reread and studied
it some more. Slowly, bit by bit, I began to understand. I realized that
National Socialism, the iconoclastic world view of Adolf Hitler; was the
doctrine of scientific racial idealism – actually a new religion...
And thus Lincoln
Rockwell became a National Socialist. But his conversion to the new religion
still did not answer his question, „What can be done?“ Eight long years of
struggle and defeat lay ahead of him before he would gain the knowledge he
needed to effectively translate his new faith into action and begin to carry on
Adolf Hitler’s great work once again. While he still lacked the wisdom that
could only come in the years ahead, he lacked nothing in energy and
determination. For a year he continued to explore the ramifications of the new
world view he had adopted and also continued his self-education in several
other areas, including the Jewish question.
Then, in November, 1952, the Navy
assigned him to a year of duty at the American base at Keflavik in Iceland,
where he was executive officer and, later, commanding officer of the Fleet
Aircraft Service Squadron there, „Fasron“107. His promotion to commander came
in October, 1953, after he had requested an extension of his Icelandic
assignment for another year. He also met and fell in love with an Icelandic
girl, who became his second wife in the same month he was promoted. This
marriage was far happier than his first. The relative isolation and solitude he
enjoyed in Iceland gave him a further opportunity to consolidate his thoughts
and to plan a campaign of political action based on his National Socialist
philosophy. Feeling that his most urgent need was some medium for the
dissemination of his political message, he considered various ways in which he
might enter the publishing business. He needed to establish a bridgehead in
this industry which would provide him with operational funds and living expenses
as well as give him a vehicle for political expression.
He finally decided to begin his
career with the publication of a monthly magazine for the wives of American
servicemen, primarily because the complete absence of any competing publication
in the field seemed to offer an excellent business advantage. He felt that he
could not only capture this market, thus assuring himself a steady income, but
that service families would provide a particularly receptive audience for his
political ideas. His idea was to employ the utmost subtlety, disguising his
propaganda so carefully that he would not jeopardize any Jewish advertising
accounts the magazine might acquire. He naively thought that he would deceive
the Jews and move the hearts and minds of his readers in the desired direction
simultaneously.
Rough plans had been laid by the
time his service in Iceland was over. His return to civilian life came on
December 15, 1954. Nine months of more planning, hard work, fund raising, and
promotion led to the realization of his ideas with the publication of his new
magazine, for which he chose the name U.S. Lady, in Washington, in September,
1955.
At the same time he was getting his
magazine underway, he began making personal contacts in right-wing circles in
the Washington area. He attended the meetings of various groups and then began
to organize meetings of his own. Before he could put his magazine to use as a
medium for disguised propaganda, however, he found himself in serious financial
difficulties, due to his lack of capital, and he was forced to sell the
magazine in order to avoid bankruptcy.
With undiminished enthusiasm, he
continued his organizing efforts among the right wing. Making the same mistake
that nearly every other beginner makes, he assumed that the proper way to
proceed lay in coordinating the numerous right-wing and conservative
organizations and individuals-bringing them together into a right-wing
superstructure where they could work effectively for their common goals. He
felt that such a coordination could make an almost miraculous transformation in
the strength of the right-wing position in America.
To this end he bought radio
advertisements, spoke at dozens of meetings, wrote numberless letters, and
devoted every waking hour to the promotion of his plan for unity. He created a
paper organization, the American Federation of Conservative Organizations, and
continued his tireless efforts to inspire and mobilize even a few of the
hundreds of right-wing groups and individuals with whom he had established
contact, but to no avail: „Our meetings were better and better attended, but
there was no result at all – nothing accomplished.“
He sadly learned that all the
right-wing groups had one weakness in common: their members loved to talk but
were incapable of action. A substantial portion of them were hobbyists – escapists
obsessed with various pet projects and absolutely invulnerable to reason, or
masochists who delighted in moaning endlessly about treason and decay but who
were shocked at the suggestion that they should help put an end to it. Many
were so neurotic that the idea of engaging them in any prolonged cooperative
effort was untenable. Some were simply insane. Virtually all were cowards.
Years of inaction or ineffectiveness had drained the ranks of the right-wing of
the type of human material essential for any serious undertaking. Very little
was left but the sort of dregs with which nothing could be done.
Unfortunately, he had failed to heed
the Leader’s warning that eight cripples who join arms do not yield even one
gladiator as a result:
And if there were
indeed one healthy man among the cripples, he would expend all his strength
just keeping the others on their feet and in this way become a cripple himself.
By the formation of a
federation, weak organizations are never transformed into strong ones, but a
strong organization can and often will be weakened. The opinion that strength
must result from the association of weak groups is incorrect..
. . . Great, truly
world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and
realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as
the undertakings of coalitions.
It has been said that experience
keeps a dear school, and in Rockwell’s case it was dear indeed. He had
exhausted all the money left from the sale of U.S. Lady by the time the last
meeting of his American Federation of Conservative Organizations, on July 4,
1956, failed to produce any concrete results. He had to find a new source of
income and considered himself fortunate to obtain a temporary position as a
television scriptwriter.
This lasted only a few months,
however, and then he took a position on the staff of the New York-based
conservative magazine, American Mercury, as assistant to the publisher. He had
learned the futility of trying to achieve effective cooperation between the
various right-wing groups and had resigned himself to forming a new
organization.
Rockwell still had two bitter
lessons to learn in the school of experience, however-lessons which the Leader
had set forth clearly in his immortal book, but which Rockwell, for all his
careful study, had failed to take to heart, just as with the admonition against
hoping to gain strength by uniting weaknesses. He still believed that the
enemies of our people could be fought effectively by the „respectable“ means to
which conservatives have always restricted themselves. He thought to avoid the „stigma“
of anti-Semitism by working silently and indirectly against treason and racial
subversion. This method had the great advantage of not provoking the enemy, so
that one could proceed peacefully and safely with one’s „silent“ work.
Thus, while working at American
Mercury he began to formulate plans for an underground, „hard-core“ National Socialist
organization, with a right-wing front and financing by wealthy conservatives.
Since the organization was to be, in effect, National Socialist, with National
Socialists at the helm and carrying out the significant activities, and the
conservative front only a disguise, he happily thought he had a plan which
would not be subject to all the flaws of those of his conservative efforts of
the past.
His new project rapidly foundered on
the shoals of reality, however. First he found that wealthy conservatives
suffered from most of the character defects that he had already observed in
not-so-wealthy conservatives. Money could be gotten from them for „pet“
projects-but not for any serious effort which smacked of danger, particularly
danger of exposure. A more fundamental weakness of the „secret“ approach,
however, lay in the fact that it is the surface disguise, the front-not the
hidden core-which determines the quality of the personnel attracted to an
organization. Thus, when his anticipated source of funds balked and his one
National Socialist recruit became discouraged and left, Rockwell was faced with
the prospect of scrapping his new idea and starting again from nothing.
Sadly he re-read the words the
Leader had written more than thirty years previously: „A man who knows a thing,
recognizes a given danger, and sees with his own eyes the possibility of a
remedy, damned well has the duty and the obligation not to work ‘silently’, but
to stand up openly against the evil and for its cure. If he does not do so then
he is a faithless, miserable weakling who fails either from cowardice or from
laziness and incompetence... Every last agitator who possesses the courage to
defend his opinions with manly forth-rightness, standing on a tavern table
among his adversaries, accomplishes more than a thousand of these lying,
treacherous sneaks.“
It had taken two years of repeated
discouragements and failures to bring this lesson home to him, but now he
understood it. He had finally seen the fallacy underlying the conservative
premise. In his own words:
Although it is made to
appear so, the battle between the conservatives and liberals is not a battle of
ideas or even of Political organizations. It is a battle of terror, and power.
The Jews and their accomplices and dupes are not running our country and its
people because of the excellence of their ideas or the merit of their work or
the genuine majority of people behind them. They are in power in spite of the
lack of these things, and only because they have driven their way into power by
daring minority tactics. They can stay in power only because people are afraid
to oppose them-afraid they will be socially ostracized, afraid they will be
smeared in the press, afraid they will lose their jobs, afraid they will not be
able to run their businesses, afraid they will lose political offices. It is
fear and fear alone, which keeps these filthy left-wing sneaks in power-not
ignorance on the part of the American people, as the conservatives keep telling
each other.
Beyond this however, he was coming
to an even more fundamental conclusion: Not only were conservatives wrong in
their evaluation of the nature of the conflict between themselves and liberals
and wrong in their choice of tactics, but their motives were also wrong; at least,
he was beginning to see that their motives differed fundamentally from his own.
Basically, the conservatives are aracial. Their primary concerns are economic:
taxes, government spending, fiscal responsibility; and social: law and order,
honest government, morality. At worst, their sole interest is the protection of
their standard of living from the encroachments of the welfare state; at best,
they are genuinely concerned about the general decay of standards and the trend
toward mobocracy and chaos. But, as a whole, they show very little concern for
the biological problem of which all these other problems are only
manifestations.
Certainly the right wing was
preferable to the left wing in this respect. At least conservatives tended to
have a healthy anti-Semitic instinct. But as long as their inner orientation
was economic-materialistic rather than racial-idealistic, they would remain
primarily interested in the defense of a system rather than a race, they would
continue to look for easy and superficial solutions rather than fundamental
ones, and they would continue to lack that spirit of selfless idealism
essential to ultimate victory. Thus, as the year 1956 drew to a close, Rockwell
was certain of one thing: Conservatives would never, by any stretch of the
imagination, be able to offer any effective opposition to the forces of
degeneration and death. As he wrote later, anyone, when he first discovers what
is going on, might be forgiven a certain period of nourishing the delusion and
hope that there is a safe, easy, and „nice“ solution to the problem. But to
pursue the same fruitless tactics year after year is evidence of something
else: Conservatives are the world’s champion ostriches, muttering to each other
down under the sand „in secret“, while their plumed bottoms wave in the breeze
for the Jews to kick at their leisure. They are fooling nobody but themselves.
The answer would have to be found
elsewhere-but where, how?
The years 1957 and 1958 were
difficult ones. As a representative of a New York management-consultant firm,
he spent most of 1957 traveling in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
writing and consolidating his thoughts whenever he could find time. The winter
of 1957-58 saw a brief interlude in Atlanta, where he sold advertising.
During this period, Rockwell had an
experience about which he has never written and which he related to only a few
people. Always a skeptic where the supernatural was concerned, he was certainly
not a man to be easily influenced by omens. Yet there can be no doubt that he
attached special significance to a series of dreams that he had then. The
dreams – actually all variations of a single dream – occurred nearly every
night for a period of several weeks and were of such intensity that he could
recall them vividly upon waking. In each dream he saw himself in some everyday
situation: sitting in a crowded theater, eating at a counter in a diner,
walking through the busy lobby of an office building, or inspecting the
airplanes of his squadron at an airfield hangar.
And in each dream a man would
approach him-theater usher, diner cook, office clerk, or mechanic – - and say
something to the effect, „Mr, Rockwell, there is someone to see you.“ And then
he would be led off to some back room or side office in the building or hangar,
as the case may have been. He would open the door and find waiting for him
inside, always alone – -Adolf Hitler. Then the dream would end.
One can most easily interpret these
dreams as a case of autosuggestion, but in the light of later developments
Rockwell considered them as a symbolic summons, a beckoning onto the path for
which he was then still groping, whether that beckoning was the consequence of
an internal or an external stimulus.
Early in 1958 he returned to
Virginia. His first effort there was in Newport News, where he produced
political cartoons in collaboration with the publisher of a small racist
magazine which shortly went bankrupt. In Newport News, however, he met a man
who was to play a critical role in changing the course of his political career:
Harold N. Arrowsmith, Jr.
Arrowsmith was a wealthy
conservative with a „pet“ project – but he was not like any other wealthy
conservative Rockwell had met. Independently wealthy as the result of an
inheritance, he had formerly been a physical anthropologist. He had stumbled
into politics rather by accident when a friend on the research staff of a
Congressional investigating committee had asked him for some help with some
library research connected with a case under investigation. In the course of
this work he had, to his surprise, come upon some of the documentary material
that had so startled Rockwell a few years earlier in San Diego.
Being a trained scholar, a linguist
with a dozen languages at his disposal, having access to all the major
libraries and archives of the Western world-and with unlimited time and money –
he was able to follow up his initial discoveries and soon had unearthed
literally thousands of items of evidence. The story they told was a shocking
and frightening one: world wars and revolutions, famines and massacres-not the
caprices of history, but the results of deliberate and cold-blooded scheming.
Although he had filing cabinets
bulging with military intelligence reports, court records, photostats of
diplomatic correspondence, and other material, he had not been able to
publicize any of his finds. Scholarly journals returned his carefully written
and documented papers with rejection slips, and it soon became apparent that no
publisher of general periodicals would accept them either. He approached
Rockwell with the proposition of printing, publishing, and distributing some of
his documentary material, with full financial backing.
They formed the „National Committee
to Free America from Jewish Domination,“ and Rockwell moved to Arlington,
Virginia, where Arrowsmith provided him with a house and printing equipment.
Rockwell had already reached the
conclusion that if any progress were to be made, it was necessary to break out
of the right-wing milieu into fresh territory. Right-wingers had been
exchanging and reading one another’s pamphlets for years, with no noticeable
results. They always used the same mailing lists and sent their propaganda to
people who, for the most part, had already heard at least a dozen variations on
the same theme. What was needed was mass publicity, so that some fresh blood
could be attracted into the Movement.
As the normal channels of mass
propaganda were closed to most right-wingers-and certainly to anyone whose
propaganda might prove distressing to Jews-Rockwell had decided that radical
means must be used to force open those channels. He placed this objective
before all others. For, he reasoned, if one is to mobilize men into an
organization – secret or otherwise – for the purpose of gaining political
power, one must first let those men know of one’s existence and communicate to
them at least a bare outline of one’s program. Until a mass of new raw material
– potential recruits – could be stirred up by making a really significant
impact on the public consciousness, there was simply no sense in proceeding
further; he had already spent too much time doing things the old way. He was,
in fact, prepared to take the next-to-last step in his progress from just
another goy to the heir to Adolf Hitler’s mighty legacy. He decided on public
agitation of the most provocative sort-agitation of such a blatant and
revolutionary sort that the mass media could not ignore it.
In May, 1958, Eisenhower had sent
U.S. marines to Lebanon to help maintain the government of President Chamoun in
power, against the wishes of the Arab citizens of that country. The Lebanese
Arabs desired closer cooperation with the other Arab states, but Chamoun, much
to the pleasure of the Jews, did not. The threat of the overthrow of Chamoun
and of a pro-Arab government coming into power in Lebanon, thus adding another
member to the Arab bloc opposing the illegal Jewish occupation of Palestine,
led U.S. Jews to press the course of U.S. intervention upon Eisenhower, always their
willing tool. The issue was much in the public eye during the summer of 1958,
and Rockwell decided to use it as the basis of his first public demonstration-a
picket of the White House. Calling on many of the contacts he had made around
the country during the past few years, he was able to arrange for a busload of
young demonstrators to come to Washington and also to organize protest groups
in both Atlanta, Georgia, and Louisville, Kentucky.
Then on Sunday morning, July 29,
1958, Rockwell led his group of pickets to the White House, while the groups in
Atlanta and Louisville began their demonstrations simultaneously. Carrying
large signs which Rockwell had designed and printed himself, these three groups
made the first public protest against Jewish control of the U.S. government
since the Jews had silenced their critics in 1941. It was indeed a momentous
occasion: not yet an open National Socialist demonstration, but a vigorous slap
in the face for the enemy-a slap which could not be ignored, as all the „secret“
right-wing activity had been for years.
Ten weeks later, on October 12, a
synagogue in Atlanta was mysteriously blown up. Police immediately swooped on
Rockwell’s men in Atlanta who had demonstrated in July. Newspapers around the
world carried front-page stories implicating Rockwell and Arrowsmith in the
bombing. Arrowsmith, who felt he was getting more involved in politics than was
comfortable, retrieved his printing equipment and withdrew Rockwell’s financial
support. For the first time, Rockwell began to get a taste of the difficult
times which lay ahead. Hoodlums, instigated by the newspaper publicity,
attacked his home. Windows were broken, and stones and firecrackers were thrown
at his house late at night. Both by day and by night he and his wife received
obscene and threatening telephone calls. Finally, for the sake of their safety,
he felt obliged to send his family to Iceland.
With its financial backing gone, the
„National Committee to Free America from Jewish Control“ was no more. The last
of Rockwell’s conservative friends evaporated in the harsh glare of newspaper
hate propaganda which was heaped upon him. As the new year, 1959, came in, he
found himself alone in an empty house, without friends or money or prospects
for the future. He had dared to seize the dragon by the tail and had survived.
Yet, in the bleak, cold days of January and February, 1959, this gave him
little comfort as he faced an uncertain and unpromising future.
... As I sat alone in
that empty house or lay alone in that even emptier bed in the silent, hollow
darkness, the full realization of what I was about bore in upon me with fearful
urgency. I realized there was no turning back; as long as I lived I was marked
with the stigma of anti-Jewishness... I could never again hope to earn a normal
living. The Jews could not survive unless they made an example of me the rest
of my life, else too many others might be tempted to follow my example. My
Rubicon had been crossed, and it was fight and win-or die.
And then something happened which,
in its way, was to be as decisive in his life as had been his finding Adolf
Hitler’s message in Mein Kampf, eight years before, in San Diego. Again, it was
like a guiding hand reaching to him from the twilight of the past – from a
charred, rubble-filled bunker in Berlin – and showing him the way. Waiting for
him at the post office one morning at the beginning of March was a large
carton. In it, carefully folded, was a huge swastika banner, which had been
sent by a young admirer.
Deeply moved, he carried the banner
home and hung it across one end of his living room, completely covering the
wall. He found a small, bronze plaque with a relief bust of Adolf Hitler, which
had been given to him earlier, and mounted it in the center of the swastika. Then
he found three candles and candle holders, which he placed on a small book-case
he had arranged just below the bronze plaque. He closed the blinds and lit the
candles:
I stood there in the
flickering candlelight, not a sound in the house, not a soul near me or aware
of what I was doing-or caring.
On that cold, March morning, alone
before the dimly lit altar, Lincoln Rockwell underwent an experience of a sort
shared by few men in the long history of our race – an experience which comes
seldom to this world but which may radically alter the course of that world
when it does. Nearly fifty-three years before, a similar experience had
befallen a man – that time on a cold, November night, on a hilltop overlooking
the Austrian town of Linz.
It was a religious experience that
was more than religious. As he stood there he felt an indescribable torrent of
emotions surging through his being, reaching higher and higher in a crescendo
with a peak of unbearable intensity. He felt the awe-inspiring awareness for a
few moments, or a few minutes, of being more than himself, of being in
communion with that which is beyond description and beyond comprehension.
Something with the cool, vast feeling of eternity and of infinity – of long
ages spanning the birth and death of suns, and of immense, starry vistas-filled
his soul to the bursting point. One may call that Something by different
names-the Great Spirit, perhaps, or Destiny, or the Soul of the Universe, or
God- but once it has brushed the soul of a man, that man can never again be
wholly what he was before. It changes him spiritually in the same way that a
mighty earthquake or a cataclysmic eruption, the subsidence of a continent or
the bursting forth of a new mountain range, changes forever the face of the
earth.
Slowly the storm subsided, and
Lincoln Rockwell – a new Lincoln Rockwell – became aware once again of the room
about him and of his own thoughts. He has described for us his feeling then:
... Where before I had
wanted to fight the forces of tyranny and regression, now I HAD to fight them.
But even more, I felt within me the power to prevail – strength beyond my own
strength – the ability to do the right thing even when I was personally
overwhelmed by events. And that strength has not yet failed me. Nor will it
fail... I knew with calm certainty exactly what to do, and I knew, in a
hard-to-explain sense, what was ahead. It was something like looking at a road
from the air after seeing only the curve ahead from the ground... Hitler had
shown the way to survival. It would be my task on this earth to carry his ideas...
to total, world-wide victory. I knew I would not live to see the victory which
I would make possible. But I would not die before I had made that victory
certain.
And just as Adolf Hitler had said of
his experience on the Freinberg, „In that hour it began,“ so in that hour it
began for Lincoln Rockwell also. He did not realize it then, of course, but
this climactic event had come almost exactly in the middle of his political
life; he had run just half the course from that fall day in 1950, in the San
Diego Public Library, to a martyr’s death in Arlington in the late summer of
1967.
Before, he had been a right-winger,
a conservative, albeit a more and more openly anti-Jewish one; before, he had
felt the need to keep his National Socialism concealed; before, while he had
admired Adolf Hitler as the greatest thinker in the history of the race and
Mein Kampf as the most important book ever written, they had not been wholly
real to him-and this attitude had resulted in his failure so often to apply the
Leader’s teachings to his own political efforts. Now, however, he was no longer
a conservative, but a National Socialist, and he would bear witness for his
faith before the whole world; now, at last, he recognized in Adolf Hitler not
just an extraordinarily great mind and spirit, but something immortal,
transcendental, more than human; now he saw the Leader as an embodiment, in a
way, of that Universal Soul with which he had briefly communed; now he was prepared
to follow the Leader’s teachings without reservation, in all things.
At the same time that these
fundamental changes in his outlook took place, he saw the need for a
fundamental change in his political tactics. He recalled the Leader’s words:
Any man who is not
attacked in the Jewish newspapers, not slandered and vilified, is no true
National Socialist. The best measure of the value of his will is the hostility
he receives from the mortal enemy of our people. . .
Every Jewish slander
and every Jewish lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors.
The man they have most
reviled stands closest to us, and the man they hate worst is our best friend.
Anyone who picks up a
Jewish newspaper in the morning and does not see himself slandered in it has
not made profitable use of the previous day; for if he had, he would be
persecuted, reviled, slandered, abused, befouled. And only the man who combats
this mortal enemy of our nation and of all Aryan humanity and culture most
effectively may expect to see the slanders of this race and the efforts of this
people directed against him.
And further:
It makes no difference
whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us, whether they represent us as
clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern
themselves with us again and again, and that we gradually appear to be the only
power that anyone reckons with at the moment. What we really are and what we
really want, we will show the Jewish journalistic rabble when the day comes.
Rockwell had already recognized the
need for gaining mass publicity by radical means, but he had flinched at the
thought of the slander and vilification, the mis-representation and ridicule
which must inevitably accompany any publicity he received through the
alien-dominated mass media. He had been living in the conservative dream world
and had shared with other right-wingers the comfortable illusion that one can
keep the enemy fooled – even make him think one is his friend – and fight him
effectively at the same time.
Even as he gradually became more
forthright in his statements with respect to the Jewish question, he retained
the feeling that to speak out openly for Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist
world view would be nothing short of suicide.
Thus he had fallen between two
stools after his demonstration of July 29, 1958. He had been numbed by the
virulence of the hatred unleashed against him, and at the same time found
himself crippled by self-imposed limitations in his own campaign.
Now, however, he had decided that
not only would he never again flinch under the torrent of abuse and slander
which his activities were sure to bring down on him, but he would provoke such
attacks by the enemy, looking upon each one as a „scar of honor“ and also as
another small step toward his eventual general recognition as the opponent of
everything the enemy stood for, as „the only power with which [that enemy]
reckoned.“ And he saw that an open avowal of his National Socialism was not
only the strongest irritant he could bring to bear against his enemy, but it
was the only realistic basis for gathering around himself those elements of the
population needed to build a viable and lasting movement with which eventually
to destroy that enemy and restore his own race to the position of strength and
health and honor from which it had abdicated.
Actually, he carried the Leader’s
counsel about the use of the enemy’s own propaganda to its logical extreme.
Looking at the task before him realistically for the first time, he saw that
the problems he faced were so severe that, in order to make any progress
against them, he would be obliged to concentrate all his energies upon one
aspect of those problems at a time.
The first step was general
recognition. His earlier conviction that that goal must be attained at the
expense of every other consideration was now stronger than ever. Thus, instead
of following the natural urge to dissociate National Socialism from the
Hollywood image that Jewry had been building for it for more than three
decades, he temporarily threw all hopes of „respectability“-even among other
National Socialists-aside and set about turning to his own advantage all the
Jews’ previous efforts.
Toward this end he deliberately
pinned on himself the label „Nazi,“ rather than „National Socialist,“ using
this bit of journalistic jargon which had been coined by the enemy during the
early days of struggle in Germany, a term looked upon by National Socialists
with about the same feeling that convinced Marxists must look upon the
designation „commie,“ or „pinko.“ Behind this step-one which was to cause much
misunderstanding and suspicion in days to come-was the cold-blooded realization
that a strutting, shouting uniform-wearing, Hollywood-style „Nazi“ was vastly
more newsworthy, had vastly more „shock value,“ than any mere National
Socialist.
As he pondered over his
soul-stirring experience and began to lay new plans for the future during the
next few days, events began flowing in the new channel marked out for them by
the finger of Destiny. Three men, a right-wing acquaintance and two other men
who were strangers to Rockwell, dropped in to see him one evening. Initially
shocked and repelled by the swastika banner in his living room, they were soon
won over by his passionate exposition of the new cause. Two of the three
remained to become his first disciples.
Then he opened the blinds on his
windows, making his swastika banner visible from the street. He issued swastika
armbands to his two recruits, and the three of them swaggered about the house
wearing holstered pistols. Later he mounted an illuminated swastika on the
roof.
The crowds came to laugh and jeer
and throw rocks-but a few remained to listen. His „stormtroopers“ grew in
number from two, to four, to ten.
These March days in 1959, which
witnessed the first genuine rebirth of National Socialist activity after nearly
fourteen years of terror and total suppression, marked the beginning of the
stormiest and most difficult times Rockwell faced. Harassed by the police with
illegal searches and confiscation of his property and materials, assaulted by
thugs and vandals whom the police made no efforts to apprehend, he and his
small group of followers printed and distributed tens of thousands of leaflets
and talked to throngs of curious and hostile visitors who came to see the „American
Fuehrer,“ as the newspapers laughingly called him. He first chose the name „American
Party“ for his embryonic organization, but soon changed the name to „American
Nazi Party.“
Keeping his initial objective
foremost in his mind, he concentrated the activities of his small group
primarily on the distribution of inflammatory leaflets, on creating public
incidents, on haranguing crowds under circumstances especially chosen to
provoke violent opposition – anything and everything, in other words, to gain
mass publicity, to become generally recognized as the opponent of the Jews and
everything they represented, from Marxism to unprincipled capitalism, from
racial degeneration to cultural Bolshevism.
His first soapbox-style public
address was delivered on the Mall, in Washington, on Sunday, April 3, 1960, and
became a regular occurrence for some time thereafter.
A letter he wrote to his mother
during this early period of public speaking gives an idea of a few of the
difficulties he faced:
7 July, 1960
Dear Mother:
Thank you for the
letter and the help. It is much appreciated... Don’t pay too much attention to
what the papers say, Mother they lie unbelievably. Last week they tried to
murder us again on the Mall here and almost killed Major Morgan, whom you met,
when they dragged him out-ten of them-and stomped him and left him for dead.
But we prevailed, and even though the police, much against their will, were
forced to arrest us for „disorderly conduct“ (for being attacked by a murderous
mob!), the people are with us. This sort of thing is inevitable, and it will
get worse. Now they have tried-yesterday – to have me heaved in an insane
asylum to shut me up, but they were surprised, as I was relieved, when people
rushed forward to offer the huge cash bond they set for me and I will have a
psychiatrist of my own choosing deliver a report, instead of the two Jews they
planned for me. Do not worry about all this. It is dangerous, painful, and
bitter when our own people do not understand what we are doing and suffering
for them, but I am sure that the Lord will not permit liars and villains to win
in the end. You will yet be mighty proud...
Love,
Link
In May, 1960, the National Socialist
Bulletin made its appearance as the first periodical published by the American
Nazi Party. It evolved in to the Stormtrooper magazine after eight issues.
Meanwhile, on February 5, 1960, the United States Navy, under pressure from
Jewish groups, forced Rockwell to accept a discharge from the Naval Reserve.
Despite the news quarantine imposed
on him, despite beatings and jailings, despite a chronic lack of funds, despite
serious personnel problems, and despite a thousand other troubles and
difficulties, his campaign to gain public recognition made steady progress.
Newspapers found it impossible to completely avoid mentioning his brash and
daring exploits; editors and columnists found irresistible the temptation to
denounce or „expose“ him. Even radio and television emcees, ever on the prowl
for sensation, yielded to temptation and defied the ban on publicity for
Rockwell.
The image of George Lincoln Rockwell
and the America Nazi Party created by the mass media for public consumption
was, of course, a grossly distorted one. Rockwell had succeeded in forcing the
media, more or less against their will, to give him publicity. Unfortunately,
he could not force them to be impartial in their treatment, or even to be
truthful, An interview with him published in the popular magazine, Playboy, was
prefaced with such editorial remarks as: „Unlike controversial past
interviewees Rockwell could not be called a spokesman for any socially or
politically significant minority. But we felt that the very virulence of
Rockwell’s messianic master-racism could transform a really searching
conversation with the 48-year-old Fuhrer into a revealing portrait of both
rampant racism and the pathology of fascism.“
Another commented: „The question of
George Lincoln Rockwell boils down, then, to the question of how far can
America let the hate-mongers go. Will an unsound branch on the tree of American
democracy fall off or will it poison the organism?“
The really ambitious writers,
editors, and reporters did not restrict themselves to such mildly prejudicial
remarks but vied with one another in concocting outrageous lies about Rockwell.
He was accused of cowardice, sadism, selfish gormandizing, kidnaping: „Like the
late Adolf Schickelgruber, on whom he models himself, he believes in leading
from behind-as far behind as possible.“ In one magazine, he was „quoted“ as
boasting that he had once castrated a heckler with his bare hands,“ and another
reported: „George Rockwell’s hysterical raving has already whipped up the
lunatic fringe to the breaking point. Last summer three of his stormtroopers
decided to please the Fuehrer by kidnaping a small Jewish child in Washington,
D.C., and holding him at the Party Headquarters for several hours. How many
more innocent citizens will be subjected to harassment before Robert F. Kennedy
and the Justice Department move in?“
Topping them all was the story that „Like
a true Nazi top dog, he avails himself of top-dog privileges and orders private
meals served in his room. He partakes of such fancy fare as turtle soup,
lobster, and steak while the men eat hash. Between meals he enjoys sucking
kumquats.“ This last flight of fancy is reminiscent of articles published in
the German press (before - 1933) which portrayed Adolf Hitler as a drunken
profligate (Hitler only drank once in his entire life: the night of his High
School Graduation) and lecher who dissipated the contributions of his followers
in high living, champagne parties, and whoring.
Rockwell accepted these lies and
slanders philosophically, for the alternative to this Jew-designed public image
even was no public image at all. As a matter of fact, the Jews-and non-Jewish
publicists anxious to demonstrate their affection for the Jews-cannot be given
all the blame for this poor image. Rockwell himself lent a conscious hand to
its creation, as he admitted when he said, „... When I have the rare
opportunity to use some mass medium, as was recently the case when I gave an
interview to Playboy, I am forced to walk a careful line between what I should
like to say and what the enemy would like to hear me say. Unless I deliberately
sound at least halfway like a raving illiterate with three loose screws, such
an interview would never be printed.“
The price he paid for becoming
generally recognized as „Mr. Nazi“ was a high one indeed. Other men with sound
racial instincts but without Rockwell’s understanding of political realities
were, naturally enough, appalled by what seemed to be Rockwell’s ridiculous
antics. Most people, even relatively sophisticated ones who talk knowingly
about „managed news,“simply find incomprehensible the Jewish Big Lie technique.
These sound but simple citizens all
too often jumped to the not-implausible conclusion that Rockwell was a kind of
agent provocateur, a traitor hired by the enemy to discredit honest racists and
patriots. His correspondence.with some of them displays a mixture of impatience
with their inability to perceive the essence of the real problems facing our
race, and a sincere desire to evoke understanding. The following extracts from
a letter to a member of a snobbish racist group calling itself the „European
Liberation Front“ are typical:
Dear Mr... :
I realize that I am
only a stupid, silly American, but I do love this country, in spite of your
denunciation of it. What you hate about it is what the Jews have done to it,
and you are like a man who permits his wife to be debauched by rapists and then
tosses her in the garbage can for it. Shame on you! „American“ influence on
Europe is not American at all, and you damned sure should know it. The real
American influence was Henry Ford, our West, and the like.
Europe is a tired old
man-more like a tired old lady - and if Western culture is to be saved, it will
be saved by the last Western barbarians, the American barbarians I love. Men
like you, suave, polished, educated, supercilious, and „above“ nasty physical
violence, cannot save themselves, let alone a nation, a culture, or a race. You
people with your „European Liberation Front“ are going at it backwards. You can’t
liberate Europe any more with Europeans. Hitler gave that effort every bit of
holy genius within him, and he was mashed by the American barbarians. You and
your egghead gang of dandies are in love with what is gone and insist on
ignoring what is here. Rome is no more. You keep trying to resurrect it, and
you can’t, because there are no more noble Romans over there, at least not
enough to make a real fight of it, Europe is like one big France – -all empty
shell, fine words, pretty songs, and dead men. We helped kill Europe. If you
did liberate it, like France was „liberated,“ it would sink into degeneracy
again in a century..
There are, of course,
good, vigorous fighting men in Europe, but they are swamped by the human
garbage left in the wreckage of two wars promoted by Jews and fought by
Americans. I am building National Socialism here, by such expedients and
methods as may be possible, and I am succeeding, in spite of your looking down
your nose at me. . .
Whenever I can get
some or the other of you to ditch the „We’re-the-real-National Socialists“ game
and start being National Socialists, I give strength to the cause to which I
have given my life, my family, my comfort, and everything else I have to give,
no matter what you may have been told...
Frankness, not diplomacy, was his
strong point.
In order to allay hostility and
suspicion as much as he could, he was soon obliged to divert some of his
energies from agitation and publicity garnering to a more sober exposition of
his ideas. His first major effort in that direction was the publication of his
political autobiography, This Time the World. Written hastily in the fall of
1960 between speaking engagements, court appearances, street brawls, and
desperate attempts to raise money to sustain his small group, he was not able
to publish it until a year later. The printing and binding of the book were
done entirely by his untrained stormtroopers, and their only machinery was a
tiny, office-style duplicator. The absolute sincerity of its tone failed to
convince few of its readers, but the difficulties of distribution, due to the
Jewish „quarantine,“ limited its circulation to a few thousand copies.
In October, 1961, the first of his
Rockwell Reports appeared. Varying in length from four to thirty-six pages, the
Rockwell Report appeared semi-monthly at first, then monthly, occasionally
lapsing into bi-monthly publication during particularly difficult periods. The
Rockwell Reports contained a lively mixture of National Socialist ideology,
current political analysis, prognostication, political cartoons and drawings,
reproductions of pertinent news clippings, and photographs of Party activities.
They all bore his unique stamp and, more than any other one thing, were
responsible for drawing to him the idealistic young men who formed the cadre of
the growing movement.
From the beginning, Rockwell had
understood the necessity for the National Socialist movement eventually to
operate from a worldwide basis. For the ultimate political goal of the Movement
was the establishment of an Aryan world order, a pax Aryana, as a prerequisite
for the attainment of the long-term racial goals of the Movement. From the
spring of 1959, this concept had existed on paper as the „World Union of
Free-Enterprise National Socialists,“ but until the summer of 1962 it was not
implemented beyond an exchange of letters with individual National Socialists
in Europe. In early August, 1962, Rockwell met with National Socialist
representatives from four other nations in the Cotswold Hills, near Cotswold,
England, and the World Union of National Socialists formally came into
existence. On the fifth of August the protocol now known as the Cotswold
Agreements was drawn up, pledging the National Socialist movements of the
United States, Great Britain, France, Germany (including Austria), and Belgium
to a common effort. Annual meetings of the World Union of National Socialists
were originally envisaged, but Fate and circumstances prevented this. Rockwell
was under increasing pressure in America during the next five years, as the
situation there grew steadily more turbulent.
Rockwell’s original program was
divided into three phases. The first phase, beginning in March, 1959, was to be
a phase of provocative but essentially non-constructive activity, intended to
generate publicity and build a public image, no matter how distorted. The
second phase was to be a cadre-building phase, during which a strong,
disciplined, effective, professional National Socialist organization was to be
built and capabilities in propaganda and organizing developed to a high degree.
The third phase was to be one of mass organization.
Phase one was masterfully executed.
Rockwell proved himself an outstanding tactician in the rough-and-tumble game
of smashing through the Jewish blackout barrier. With cool objectivity, he
watched the press heap bucket after bucket of lies and filth on his image,
provoking them to renewed activity whenever they tired. With keen insight he
analyzed the Jewish situation. He understood that though they occupied the key
positions of control in the public-opinion-forming networks, they were
constrained to a large extent by the fact that that control must remain hidden
from the public.
Furthermore, he understood the fact
that a very substantial portion of the reporters, editors, columnists,
newscasters, and even many individual newspaper and broadcast-station owners
are not Jews, and, barring direct and categorical orders to the contrary from
the key Jews, these people can be counted upon to react in a more-or-less
predictable way to a given stimulus. Thus, by taking a position and making
statements which seemed extreme and even ridiculous to the „average citizen,“
he could entice publicists to quote him widely, thinking thus to discredit both
the man and the philosophy with these average citizens. What they failed to
understand was that before the Movement could profit from any mass appeal, it
had to appeal to a large number of very un-average citizens – fearless
idealists who could form the National Socialist cadre.
And these men responded in a very different
way to Rockwell’s message than did the liberal publicists or their average
audience. They saw beyond the superficial „ridiculousness“ of his message to
the kernel of deep truth that it contained. While the average citizen,
incapable of thinking beyond the immediate problems of the day, found Rockwell’s
message „too extreme,“ just as the publicists intended, those who could
extrapolate in their minds the developments of the present to the consequences
of tomorrow-and of a century hence-saw the compelling necessity of his demands.
But such men are rather sparsely distributed throughout the population, and to
reach them Rockwell needed to cast his net very wide; this the publicists
helped him do while they thought to smear him. Rockwell also understood that
the image of him being erected in the minds of the masses, while a liability
now, had a value for the future, when conditions had ripened so that at least
some of those masses were ready for an „extremist.“
Phase two – cadre building and organizational
development – in a sense was co-extant with phase one, for from the very
beginning Rockwell’s publicity began to attract a few of the idealists needed
for phase two, and these men began to constitute the skeleton of the
organizational structure which was later to be filled out. Even a bit of phase
three entered the picture during the first phase, when Rockwell conducted a
campaign to become governor of the state of Virginia in 1965.
This election campaign proved to be
a period of extremely valuable training not only for Rockwell but for the
leadership personnel of his entire Party. Realizing the eventual need to
develop proficiency at mass campaigning, Rockwell decided to begin acquiring
experience in that direction soon rather than late. As he later admitted, after
winning less than 1.5% of the votes cast, the campaign also provided a more
fundamental lesson and helped him to realistically re-evaluate the entire
status of the Movement. Before, he had taken overly optimistic view that the Movement
would begin to pick up substantial mass following as soon as it had gained
sufficient publicity through his phase-one activities; that is, he believed
that phases two and three would be largely concurrent.
After the Virginia campaign, having
been reminded once again of the stupendous inertia of public opinion, he
realized that phase two would be much longer than originally anticipated, and
that the beginning of any substantial success from phase-three activity would
have to await two things: a considerable internal strengthening of the Movement
and a considerable worsening of the general racial-social-economic situation.
With this first thing in mind, he
made the decision in 1966 to inaugurate a general activity. As mentioned
before, the first two phases of Party activity overlapped to a large extent,
and the transition between the two was marked primarily by a shift of emphasis.
Phase one was the „Nazi“ era of the Movement. Phase two is the beginning of the
National Socialist era. In line with this re-emphasis, the American Nazi Party
officially became the National Socialist White People’s Party on January 1,
1967, and that date can reasonably be considered to mark the transition. Six
months earlier, the appearance of National Socialist World was a major step in
this direction. And six months after that date – in June, 1967 – a historic
re-organizational conference of the Party leadership was held in Arlington.
There Rockwell set the Movement on its new course, explaining the need for a
total professionalization of every activity, from fund raising to propaganda
writing, in order to meet the severe demands to be expected during the long
period of growth and struggle ahead.
He was now forty-nine years old. For
the past eight years he had been working an average sixteen hours a day, seven
days a week. The strain on his physical and spiritual resources had been
severe. Usually he was obliged to concentrate on the several tasks
simultaneously. There was always a demonstration to be planned, a speech to be prepared,
propaganda to be written, a court case to be fought, money to be raised, and
everything to be done under nearly impossible working conditions, with
incessant interruptions. Only the immense vitality of his rugged,
six-foot-four-inch frame and a deep reserve of spiritual strength had sustained
him in the past.
The course that lay ahead would
certainly be no easier; on the contrary, in addition to the old tasks connected
with agitation and publicity, there would be many new problems to be faced as
the Movement continued into its new phase of activity.
Other men – strong men – might have
yielded to the temptation to remain with a prescription to which they had
become accustomed and not venture from a beaten path into strange and difficult
territory. The slightest trace of subjectivity would allow them to ring forth a
hundred reasons for not changing a modus operandi which they had found
successful in the past. And yet it was characteristic of Rockwell that he did
not hesitate for an instant. When he saw that the time had come for the
Movement to change its tactics and accept a different set of challenges, he set
himself to the new task with the same determination that he had shown
throughout the first phase.
Now it was necessary to build up a
whole new public image for the Party, or, rather, gradually to transform the
grossly distorted image he had induced the enemy to build for him to one closer
to the truth. It was a demanding task, and he spent the summer of 1967 in
laying plans for the future and in finishing his new book, White Power.
In one of his last letters, written
in August to two faithful Party comrades, man and wife, he reveals a little of
the introspection which occupied his mind at this decisive time:
Dear
By no means do I get
the solid feeling that [you] are clear in your own minds on what has been done,
what should be done now, and what might be done (or not done) in the future.
For this reason, after much of my favorite recent hobby – tossing and turning –
I have arisen as dawn is creeping over this benighted city to set forth on
paper some thoughts which might help.(And often I find that such efforts to
help others, help me in the process.) There is no plan or overall approach in
this letter; it’s just jewels, pearls, and clinkers from a mind which seems to
be in a state of near-collapse and rebellion. First let me present an insoluble
problem within me. Doing my best to learn from history, I am aware of a fact of
all great struggles. There have been millions of causes, battles, and so on,
almost all of them lost. History rarely records the losers, except when they
get hacked up in a particularly interesting and dramatic manner. But there are
some winners, who do get recorded in history and I have examined these pretty
carefully (wishing someday to join their exalted ranks) to see if there is any
common pattern to their activity on this planet which might be a key to why
they won, when almost everybody loses. There is absolutely no doubt about it;
there is such a pattern, even though the causes and struggles vary in content
or aim from Lenin’s Bolshevism to Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, from a
little old lady set on running her neighbor out of town to Genghis Khan and his
human hamburger machine. The winners in every case have been more determined,
more fanatical in their ruthless refusal to quit, than their competitors. This
would seem to indicate that victory is given to him who is most persevering.
But this has not been true, either. History abounds with persevering nuts who
have repeatedly hopped off hills and buildings wearing „wings“ and just as
repeatedly landed on their behinds until there was nothing left...
The conclusion I reach
from all this is that it takes three things to make a winner: a good cause,
i.e., a cause which is in time, in phase, and needed; a leader who is
unshakeable in his determination to fight as long as he has a couple of stumps
for legs and who can inspire that same will in his troops; and some plain good
luck. As I examine my own cause, leadership, and luck, I find that it is
absolutely impossible for me to make a detached judgment on whether I am one of
the fanatics hopping off a hill with a pair of Woolworth, glue-and-feathers
wings, or whether I am one of the guys who gets modeled into stone images for
the benefit of pigeons. ... I do not think either of you knows the answer to
that one, either. However, I have the advantage over both of you in that I
long, long ago made up my mind that the best thing I can do with my life – what’s
left of it – is to take aim, do my best to control the inevitable shaking, and
never take my eye and heart off the target until it goes down...
ON THE 25th OF AUGUST, 1967, a
Friday, at two minutes before noon, near his Arlington headquarters, an
assassin’s bullet struck him down.
The murderer, a man whom Rockwell
had expelled from the Party a few months earlier for his repeated attempts to
inject Marxist ideas subtly into Party publications and for publicly expounding
a doctrine of racial Bolshevism, had lain in ambush atop a nearby building and
fired into Rockwell’s car as it drove by. Ironically, Rockwell had rescued this
puffed-up little Bolshevik from the gutters of New York City eight years
before, and he had taken an almost fatherly interest in him ever since. He had
never given up his repeated attempts to instill a little decency and sense of
honor into him, despite overwhelming evidence that the man was a compulsive
liar and thief and an incurable conspirator. All his well-meant efforts in this
direction were rewarded only with heartache after heartache over the years – and
finally with death, when the vicious little punk he thought he could make into
a man found a chance to „get even“ for being expelled from the Party.
Following a denial by the United
States government of Commander Rockwell’s right to burial in a national
cemetery, his Party comrades had his body cremated, and a National Socialist
memorial service was held in Arlington on the afternoon of August 30. His
eulogy was short but moving.
National Socialist
comrades! Fellow White Americans! Today we take upon ourselves the sorrowful
task of laying to rest the mortal remains of our beloved Commander, Lincoln
Rockwell, martyred by the bullet of a cowardly assassin. To those of us who
worked with him every day, to those Party comrades all over America, and to
dedicated National Socialists throughout the world the staggering loss imposed
by his death will only be fully felt in the days and years of struggle which
lie ahead of us all. His inspiration and his will, the depth of his wisdom and
the heroism of his spirit-these are the things which gave us the motivation and
the guidance we sorely needed to keep up the fight on so many dark days in
years past.
The stunning
suddenness of his departure and the ensuing turmoil of the last few days have
kept us from yet assessing the magnitude of our loss. But even harder to bear
than this, perhaps, has been utterly shabby-the despicably shameful-treatment
of our fallen Commander by a government of the nation he served so faithfully
throughout all the years of his manhood. George Lincoln Rockwell gave his life
in the struggle against Bolshevism at a time when thousands of other American
fighting men on the other side of the world are also falling victims to that same
Bolshevism – and yet an American government has denied his request to be laid
to rest in the place of his choice.
George Lincoln
Rockwell served America for twenty years and through two wars, risking his life
again and again in defense of the land and the people he loved so well. He was
no armchair soldier, but he chose of his own will that soldierly profession
demanding the very highest order of courage and skill: he was a fighter pilot.
His dedication to duty, his daring, his proficiency led him from the rank of
Seaman to that of full Commander, gave him the leadership of three squadrons,
and earned him nine decorations. And an American government does not hold him
fit to be buried beside his fellow fighting men.
George Lincoln
Rockwell has sacrificed more and fought harder for the things he held dear-his
native land, his fellow countrymen, and above all his race-than any man now
living. He saw his duty and unflinchingly did it, even when that duty led him
into opposition to nearly all those around him. He saw further than other men,
and he fought harder. Indeed, in this latter regard he cherished the maxim of
the great Leader whose philosophy moulded his own thoughts: Those who want to
live, let them fight; and those who do not want to fight in this world of
eternal struggle do not deserve to live.
He fought, and he
died. And yet Lincoln Rockwell is not really dead, for he built a Movement and
he spread an idea, and that Movement was not destroyed nor that idea silenced
by the bullet that struck him down. And so long as that Movement remains and
that idea continues to fill the hearts and minds of men, the spirit of Lincoln
Rockwell lives on.
The ashes of the
martyr lie here before us, and we cannot help but be filled with a solemn sense
of tragedy. Yet we are not really here to mourn him, but to honor him and to
rededicate ourselves to the Cause which he served. In the times ahead we must
redouble our efforts, so that he will not have died in vain. We must let his
great sacrifice serve to inspire us onward in our struggle toward victory-the
victory of our people, of our great White race, over the disease which now
afflicts it and the enemies who now oppress it. Indeed at this moment we must
bear in mind that old saying which the Commander paraphrased for us: ‘The
stones and mortar of our Movement are the bones and blood of its martyrs.’ It
is this aspect of his death that he would now want us to keep uppermost in
mind, forgetting our sorrow and filling ourselves with pride at the knowledge
we followed such a leader.
For it was he, Lincoln
Rockwell, who again picked up the torch which fell to earth twenty-two years
ago. Adolf Hitler founded our great Movement and will forever fill a unique
position in the saga of our race; but had it not been for Lincoln Rockwell,
Adolf Hitler’s mighty work might well have been in vain. It was Lincoln
Rockwell who set us once again on the upward path when we had faltered and
wanted to go back again. It was his example which inspired us to do what we
knew we should do rather than that which was easiest to do. It was his hand
which led us out of the maze of defeat and degeneration and despair, and
pointed the way toward higher things; and his voice which reminded us over and
over again that we must continue the struggle for our race.
As we lay to rest the
mortal remains of Lincoln Rockwell, it is appropriate to read once again that
passage from the Leader’s book which he loved best. I shall read from chapter
twelve of the first volume of the Commander’s personal copy of Mein Kampf:
When human hearts
break and human souls despair, the great vanquishers of distress and care, of
shame and misery, of spiritual slavery and physical duress look down upon them
from the twilight of the past and hold out their eternal hands to faint-hearted
mortals. Woe to the people that is ashamed to grasp them!
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