“The Klan looks forward to the day when the Negro problem will have been solved on some much saner basis than miscegenation, and when every State will enforce laws making any sex relations between a white and a colored person a crime,” said Hiram Evans, leader of the national Ku Klux Klan from 1922 through 1939. Echoing the work of Stoddard and others, he added:
The Jew is a more complex problem. His abilities are great, he contributes much to any country where he lives. This is particularly true of the Western Jew, those of the stocks we have known so long. Their separation from us is more religious than racial. When freed from persecution these Jews have shown a tendency to disintegrate and amalgamate. We may hope that shortly, in the free atmosphere of America, Jews of this class will cease to be a problem. Quite different are the Eastern Jews of recent immigration, the Jews known as the Askhenasim. It is interesting to note that anthropologists now tell us that these are not true Jews, but only Judaized Mongols-Chazars. These, unlike the true Hebrew, show a divergence from the American type so great that there seems little hope of their assimilation.19
That the evolution from British Israelism to Anglo-Israelism and the acculturation of Hine’s ideas into the North American context coincided with the first major Klan revival carried important implications for what became known as Christian Identity. Many trace the growing interest in the KKK to America’s first major motion picture blockbuster, D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. The movie reinforced, in the nation’s popular imagination, a nostalgic and positive image of the post–Civil War South, lionizing the Ku Klux Klan as noble guardians of domestic order and the dignity of white women. The movie focused its bias against blacks, but anti-Semitism played a crucial role in the Klan’s reemergence as well. When, in 1915, the governor of Georgia commuted the death sentence of Leo Frank, a Jewish industrialist convicted for supposedly murdering Mary Phagan, one of his factory workers, a mob of twenty-five men forcibly removed Frank from prison and lynched him. This group, the Knights of Mary Phagan, became the foundation for the new Klan, which, under the leadership of former Confederate colonel William Simmons, held a symbolic cross-burning ceremony in 1915 that officially started the Klan revival in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Thus began a surge in KKK activity that is almost unimaginable to modern sensibilities. At its peak, during the 1920s, the KKK enjoyed an estimated membership of up to 8 million, with franchises in most states, appealing to both urban and rural Americans concerned about the changing social and economic dynamics in the nation.
Becoming one of the largest fraternal organizations in the country, the Klan began to formalize its activities in ways reminiscent of groups like the Freemasons and the Knights of Pythias. It revamped the Reconstruction-era Klan hierarchy with a system of official ranks. The Imperial (or Grand) Wizard ran a multiregional Klan group, Grand Dragons ran state franchises, and Grand Giants ran county subgroups, or Klaverns. To these the Klan added the position of a Kleagle, or recruiter. It modeled its procedures and guidelines on established fraternal groups, making sure to use the letters Kl when appropriating such conventions. Its national rules and regulations could be found in a Klonstitution; its official meetings became Klonvocations; and each separate Klavern had its own Kloran, which set forth meeting procedures and rituals.
As they had during Reconstruction, many KKK members sought a veneer of biblical legitimacy to justify their ideas. Each Klavern had its own chaplain (called a Kludd), and each recruit was asked to confirm his religious bona fides as a (Protestant) Christian. But the KKK’s preferred passage of scripture, Romans 12, put the lie to its pretense of piety. Romans 12, the “foundation of the Invisible Empire” according to luminaries such as William Simmons, implores Jews and gentiles alike to “live peaceably with all men” in a spirit of “brotherly love,” to avoid revenge, and to feed one’s enemies.20 This is hardly a sincere foundation for a group associated with many of the 559 lynchings of African Americans that occurred from 1920 to 1929. The FBI rightfully called the KKK’s pretense of religion a “false front” and “bait.”21 A genuine religious movement would not have lost members by the millions, in a precipitous fashion, as a result of the Great Depression. And while it directed violence at blacks, the Second Klan noticeably did not attack Jewish targets in large numbers after 1915.
At its core, the Klan remained a reactionary, ethno-chauvinist terrorist group, bent on preserving white supremacy. Over time, it became significant to any discussion of domestic, religious terrorism because elite members of the Ku Klux Klan often became the most zealous, if often covert, proponents of Christian Identity. The Second Klan’s significance in the evolution of Anglo-Israelism is more representative than substantive: It shows how open 1920s and 1930s America was to anti-Semitism and racism. It was in that environment that two men popularized Anglo-Israelism and imbued it with concepts of anti-Semitism and racism that continue to resonate in Christian Identity theology. Howard Rand, a New England lawyer, coined the term Christian Identity. In Michael Barkun’s excellent study of the origins of Christian Identity, Religion and the Racist Right, he describes Rand as the “the critical bridging figure between mainstream British Israelism and its subsequent American variant, Christian Identity.” An “extraordinary organizer,” Rand “single-mindedly … created a national movement,” traveling, in one estimation, “eighteen thousand miles through the South; twelve thousand miles through the Middle West; and fifty thousand miles during eight months in the West” on behalf of his organization, the Anglo-Saxon Federation. Barkun also notes that while Rand “completed the consolidation” of Christian Identity in the United States, he also opened it to “right-wing and anti-Semitic influences that were to be amplified in postwar years.”22
Just as if not more important to the development of those influences was William J. Cameron, a member of the Anglo-Saxon Federation but more importantly a writer, editor, and publisher for automobile tycoon Henry Ford’s periodical the Dearborn Independent. Cameron used the pulpit of that paper, which boasted a circulation, at its peak, of seven hundred thousand, to promote virulently anti-Semitic messages. More than anything, Cameron focused his attention on an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to undermine the common good. Cameron promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax supposedly documenting just such a Jewish cabal, which has been read and believed by millions.23 Cameron assembled his collective anti-Semitic works into a four-volume set, known as The International Jew, and groups like the NSRP continued to market it to white supremacists decades after Cameron began propagandizing in the 1920s.
Although KKK membership dissipated in the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the idea that Jews were in some way responsible for that calamity gained a noteworthy following inside the United States, including among a circle of preachers taking advantage of the growing popularity and availability of radio. These men shifted in their stereotypes, at times playing on the age-old prejudices that Jews ran the world’s financial institutions and at other times conversely claiming that Jews were active supporters of communism. Among the most prominent was Catholic radio preacher Father Charles Edward Coughlin, who once said, “By their failure to use the press, the radio and the banking house, where they stand so prominently, to fight communism as vigorously as they fight Nazism, the Jews invite the charge of being supporters of communism.”24 Father Coughlin, it should be noted, reached an audience so large that in some weeks he received 1 million different pieces of fan mail. For all his anticommunism, Coughlin was an economic populist and supporter of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long’s Share Our Wealth program.25 It was there that he influenced a young aide to Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, an ordained minister since 1916 in the Disciples of Christ.26
Smith had already adapted many of the CI ideas espoused by the likes of Rand and Cameron. In 1942 he parlayed the organizational and communication talents he had honed working for Long into his own movement, the Christian Nationalist Crusade. The group’s stated purpose was to “preserve A
merica as a Christian nation being conscious of a highly organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition.”27 Smith published a newsletter, The Cross and the Flag, which espoused these ideas to a national audience.
Smith’s newsletters and literature became influential among an Atlanta-based white supremacist group known as the Columbians. Though no direct evidence exists, the group appears to have become an incubator for Christian Identity leaders in the Southeast. The group itself did not assume or aspire to any religious or spiritual identity. Instead, as World War II came to a close, the Columbians presented themselves as a pro-Nazi group that could “ethnically cleanse” Atlanta of its Jewish and black citizens. By 1949 it had recruited an estimated two hundred members with a simple pitch: “Do you hate Jews? Do you hate Negroes? Do you have 3 dollars?” Privately, the group hoped to lead what one author called a fascist “putsch” to take control of not only Atlanta but also the state of Georgia and the entire United States, if possible. It stockpiled weapons and encouraged ethnic violence to that end. It also nurtured two people who became important members of the NSRP: Emory Burke and Dr. Edward Fields. Burke, in fact, had cofounded the Columbians, and by the time Atlanta law enforcement completed its crackdown of his group, Burke had become an active member of Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade.
The Columbians may have been influenced by Canadian fascist groups, which likely had connections to Anglo-Israelism factions in places like Quebec and Vancouver. The symbol the Columbians adopted, a thunderbolt, had for years belonged to the Union of Canadian Fascists, which in turn embraced the symbol in honor of the Nazi SS. It later became the symbol of the NSRP. Reports show that Canadian fascist material entered the United States in scores in the 1940s. Some of it became highly influential in helping students of Gerald Smith shape Christian Identity into a fully formed theological framework by 1949.
An Anglo-Israelism contingent emerged in Canada in the early 1900s and blossomed through the 1920s. But soon a schism divided the British-Israelite congregation in Vancouver, with some members shifting their ideology in the same racist, anti-Semitic direction as their American cousins. By the early 1940s, this Canadian offshoot, the British-Israelite Congregation of Greater Vancouver, appears to have anticipated several of the interpretative moves formalized by America’s Identity theologians. The Canadians produced written works that heavily influenced many American white supremacists. Published anonymously in 1944, a small work of nonfiction called When Gog Attacks became especially important to CI thinking. Historian Robert Singerman characterized the book as follows:
Drawing on Lothrop Stoddard, the writer dissolves away, much like the cube of sugar falling into a cup of tea, the Jews who are not Jews at all, beginning with the Ashkenazim who are the round-skulled (brachycephalic) descendants of a “mongrel breed of minor Asiatic races, with a strong admixture of Turko-Mongol blood … the Ashkenazim is [sic] therefore neither Jewish nor Semitic, and that therefore their claims to Palestine have no basis of fact whatsoever.”28
Whereas Stoddard imagined two races of Jews, the author of When Gog Attacks applied the label of Ashkenazim to all self-proclaimed Jews. Those properly understood to be Jews by mainstream society were all imposters or “counterfeit.” The Canadian racists extended this idea one step further in another influential 1944 work, When? A Prophetic Novel of the Very Near Future. Authored under the pseudonym H. Ben Judah, When? imagines an apocalyptic world through the experiences of a British intelligence agent who visits Palestine. There the agent discovers the secret behind history’s darkest conspiracy, one that goes back to Cain, the murderer of his brother Abel, in the book of Genesis. In the Bible’s telling, as punishment for the murder, God exiles Cain to the Land of Nod, fated to be “fugitive and a wanderer,” his bloodline terminated by the Great Flood. But in his thriller, Ben Judah provides a different twist. The big reveal, according to Barkun, is as follows:
Cain, it seems, founded a secret society to do the Devil’s work on earth, and had been so successful that everyone on earth with the exception of Noah and his family “appears to have come under the control of Satan.” Unfortunately Noah’s line was contaminated when Ham married a descendant of Cain’s and thus “the contaminated blood was brought through the Flood.” Cain’s conspiracy continued on through history, controlled by certain of the Ashkenazim Jews.”29
While there are only suggestions that the Canadian books found their way to the Columbians, there is no doubt that they became very important to a handful of Gerald Smith’s mentees on the West Coast in the 1940s. Smith nurtured a generation of ministers who reinterpreted the book of Genesis, with Cain as the pivotal figure. They included among their ranks San Jacinto Capt, Bertrand Comparet, and Conrad Gaard. But the most influential and important apprentice to Smith was the Reverend Wesley Albert Swift.
Owing as much to his charisma as his biblical exegesis, Swift popularized a form of Christian Identity known as the two-seedline theory, rooted in a twist on the biblical creation story. Swift and others argued that Eve engaged in two conjugal relationships: one with Adam, creating the seedline for white Europeans, and a second with the serpent (representing Satan), creating the seedline for Jews. In arguing that Jews were literally Satan’s spawn, Swift provided ideological justification for many acts of religious terrorism. This twisted theology continues to be believed and used as justification for violence to this day.
The son of a Methodist minister, Wesley Swift became an evangelical minister at age seventeen. He moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles to continue his studies at Kingdom Bible College. By the mid-1940s, he had established his own church in the nearby city of Lancaster. In California Swift became friendly with other sycophants of Gerald Smith, including San Jacinto Capt and Bertrand Comparet.
That southern California became the epicenter for Christian Identity thinking may not have been an accident. Readers of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath are well aware of the migration of Great Plains farmers to counties like San Bernardino and Orange. Among other things, the region’s clime and soil allowed for the farming of cotton, a familiar crop to the disposed farmers. But those same farmers often came from states and regions with a history of Jim Crow segregation. Tom Joad, in other words, could well have been a racist. Connie Lynch, son of a cotton farmer from Texas, certainly was when he migrated to the Golden State in 1936.
Again, prior to the 1940s, Anglo-Israelism rooted its belief system in speculation on the genealogy of the lost tribes of Israel. For the most part, the religion followed the traditional interpretations of Christianity, at least in its fundamentalist, evangelical context. This belief system included a conventional interpretation of the book of Genesis and the human origin story. As has been told for centuries, the basic story has God creating the earth in seven days, forming Adam from dust on the sixth day, forming Eve from Adam’s rib, and placing both in the Garden of Eden. Warned by God to avoid eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Eve succumbs to the temptations of the serpent, a manifestation of the devil, and both Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise. The children of Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel; the former kills the latter and then Eve gives birth to another son, Seth. Seth and Cain become the biblical basis for mankind’s bloodlines. Generations hence, Abraham reaches a covenant with God; Abraham’s descendants, the Hebrews, or tribes of Israel, are blessed by God. In the Christian tradition, centuries later the Jews are blessed with a savior, Jesus, who changes the covenant and extends God’s grace to Jews and gentiles alike.
But Swift and others offered key revisionist interpretations to the original story of the Garden of Eden, with cascading effects for Christian Identity theology. In Swift’s retelling, Eve engaged in an illicit sexual relation with the serpent. Cain is not the offspring of Adam and Eve; per Swift, he is the child of Eve and Satan. Cain’s bloodline yields demonic offspring—and in Swift’s genealogy, those descendants are the humanoids who in the modern world call themselves Jews. These Jews—referred t
o by Swift as Ashkenazic Jews—are imposters, engaged in a centuries-long cosmic conspiracy against the true chosen people, the descendants of Seth, white Europeans. The imposter Jews manipulate other races, who Swift insisted were not fully human either but instead were descendants of the “beasts of the field,” animals that, per Genesis, roamed the world before and concurrently with Adam and Eve.
The introduction of another seedline, from Satan through Cain, closed the biblical circle for dedicated racists of a religious bent like Swift and his friends. They had already embraced the genealogical ideas proposed by men like Hine in the 1880s: The Hebrew patriarch Abraham still reaches a covenant with God; his grandchild Jacob still becomes the father of Israel; Jacob’s son Joseph still becomes viceroy in Egypt; the prophet Moses still leads the Israelites out of Egypt and into Palestine. None of these events refers to the history of the people currently identified as Jews, however, for theologians like Swift. Rather, the descendants of Jacob, the twelve tribes (representing Jacob’s children and grandchildren), are from a different bloodline. When ten of those tribes, occupying northern Israel, are deported by the Assyrians, they migrate to the European continent over a span of centuries. Two tribes in particular, descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh, migrate to and populate the United Kingdom. As descendants of Jacob’s son Joseph, these two tribes are, according to biblical tradition, especially blessed by God to form the House of Israel.
It is here that the introduction of Cain as an agent of Satan and as a progenitor of the Jews becomes so important. A conventional interpretation of the Gospels of Jesus (and the letters of Paul) suggests the potential for all the world to embrace Jesus’s message and in so doing find salvation. Presumably this could include Ashkenazic Jews, if they accepted Jesus as the Messiah. But if Ashkenazic Jews were not even human, if they were the spawn of Satan, then such grace could never be given. Taken out of context, passages in the New Testament where Jesus refers to Jews as “the Synagogue of Satan” or as a “brood of vipers” give support to this interpretation and become key parts of the Christian Identity message under Swift. The Pharisees and the Sanhedrin who Jesus confronts are not just the chosen people gone astray. They are servants of Lucifer.
America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States Page 4
