"What is America," Hitler once said to one of his seconds, "but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records, and Hollywood?" It is an observation that has often been made about the United States, not quite accurate, but not without its merits. What Hitler disliked about the United States was not its ideology (I suppose he assumed it never had a self-respecting ideology worthy of a mature, "racially pure" people) but rather its popular culture, the great leveler of taste, tradition, and thought, the force that unraveled ideology by stating simplistically that what is popular is what is important.

This is made clear in many passages in Mein Kampf; for instance, when Hitler speaks of the destruction of the German working classes: "Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in backstairs literature and the yellow press, [the bourgeoisie] see the poison poured into the people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the low 'moral content,' the 'national indifference,' of the masses of the people." So Hitler saw the German working classes on the verge of the same abyss that had claimed the Americans: cheap popular culture, empty of anything but distraction and sensation, reducing life from the heroic exercise of the will and the fulfillment of historical destiny to an escape from boredom and lassitude.

In 1962, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, said in a speech at Carleton College, "In between the Nazis and the Communists is the great mass of non-fanatics, the TV watchers and the comic book readers." In between the two great warring ideologies was the wasteland of the uncommitted, the unaware, the uninvolved, the great masses sleepwalking through history, drugged by advertising (a field in which Rockwell once worked, which may explain his cynicism), frustrated by falsely generated and irrelevant desires, and satiated by cheap, useless consumer goods.

Rockwell, like Hitler, had a low regard for the taste of the masses. (At the height of his notoriety in the 1960s, Rockwell spent his time, when he was not agitating social unrest, writing while listening to J. S. Bach, a certain proof that one's taste in music is completely unrelated to one's taste in politics, or to one's morality, although Rockwell, like many others at various points on the political spectrum, did not see it that way.) In effect, like Hitler, Rockwell had a low regard for the United States, despite his professed love for his country, despite the fact that he fought for his country in two wars (World War II and Korea), despite his implacable hatred of communism as the evil antithesis of America. He, too, saw America as a shallow place, with petty values, bad taste, and a madness for money; this was why Rockwell thought America was so vulnerable to utter racial mongrelization, or rather thought this cultural degradation that afflicted the nation was a sign of creeping and insistent mongrelization. Naturally, the cause of this degradation for Rockwell was Jews, just as Hitler came to this realization in Mein Kampf.

Of both Hitler and Rockwell we can say that their sense of the political hinged a great deal on aesthetics. In the opening chapter of his 1967 book, White Power, completed shortly before his death, Rockwell lists various events and occurrences in both America and Europe as indicative of the "Death Rattle" (the title of the first chapter) of Western civilization. Most of what he describes is related, not to politics, but to art and what we might call lifestyle: homosexuality, Negro Santa Clauses, college sex orgies, popular dancing, avant-garde sculpture and painting. Rockwell, like Hitler, was not engaged merely in a political war against Jews and their minions but a cultural war against Judeo-Christian ethics, against the self-sacrificing Jewish savior who preached equality and caring for the weak, against Jewish ideas of political subversion and moral upheaval, for everything was the work of the Jews, from Dadaism to pornography, from Communism to a monetary system without specie currency, from secular humanism to the welfare state. Rockwell felt precisely as Nietzsche wrote in The Anti-Christ: "That which does not belong to our life menaces it." Every political and theological extremist believes this, and Nazis are no exception. One belongs or one is the enemy, a threat to the security and peace of the realm.

Like Savitri Devi, the French-born, Greek Nazi who spent several years in India trying to fashion a Hindu-Aryan myth of white paganism, what Rockwell most deeply yearned for, other than real political power (which he never came close to achieving), was something on the order of an Aryan utopia where, fueled by social Darwinist principles, one supposes, whiteness would be as idealized and romanticized as Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, made it seem to be. It was not an odd thing for certain Europeans to want, being as tribally fixated, as alarmist, about their race as many of them are. It was not an odd thing, or an inexplicable thing, for a white American to want in the 1960s, sensing his country to be on verge of anarchism and complete social breakdown because of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the revolution in American art, from rock and roll to Andy Warhol. But it was frightening to think of what it was going to cost everyone who was outside the tribe, the enormous price in blood that would have to be paid, to assure, for these whites, the survival and the success of the superiority of whiteness.

Rockwell launched his American Nazi Party in October 1959, in an office in Arlington, Virginia.1 The American Nazi Party was the outgrowth of an earlier organization he had founded in 1958 called the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists. (This later became the World Union of National Socialists when Rockwell worked with Nazis abroad to try to start a unified worldwide movement.) To announce himself, freely and openly, as a Nazi, was an aim that Rockwell had been moving toward for several years. He was aware that there was no turning back once he identified himself in that way. He felt he had no choice if he was to achieve his aim: the destruction of the Jews and the world communist conspiracy and the restoration of a white America through the massive deportation of blacks and the retrieval of "Aryan" cultural traditions.

Before he openly became a Nazi, Rockwell had been involved with various racist, right-wing political organizations. He had been connected with the National States Rights party, which had a considerable collection of personalities on the fringe, some of whom crossed over into the Nazi party. He was an organizer for Robert Snowden's Americans for Constitutional Action, and he tried to organize an umbrella group called The American Federation of Conservative Organizations. He had a brief fling with Robert Welch's John Birch Society.

But Rockwell did not have the personality to work within an organizational framework. When he tried this, he was often fired for being insubordinate. Rockwell could only be a leader, and he could only lead something that he himself had created. In any case, he regarded the run of right-wing groups, whether mainstream or on the racist fringe, as generally too timid, not extreme enough. By contrast he loved Joe Mc Carthy, Rockwell's kind of anti-communist: brazen, infuriating to the liberal Left, willing to root out communists at any cost, even of their constitutional and civil rights.

Rockwell was especially scornful of American conservatives, dismissing them as armchair activists. He made this complaint often to William F. Buckley, saying that the two of them were alike in their thinking but that Buckley and other conservatives like him were simply afraid to admit it. Buckley was rightly horrified by such a comparison. "Throughout his career," writes Frederick J. Simonelli, "Rockwell steadfastly maintained that the vast majority of American whites secretly agreed with him but lacked the courage to do so openly." Rockwell referred to Robert Welch as "Rabbit" Welch. He even thought segregationists like George Wallace were insufficiently militant in their assertion of the white man's rights. All conservative thinking, Rockwell believed, all anti-communist thinking, all racist thinking logically culminated in Nazism; it was that to which all right-wing politics aspired.

Rockwell's Nazism was an expression of a particularly remarkable form of megalomania. He believed that through a combination of increasing urban and racial unrest (which he was correct in predicting with urban riots, violent street demonstrations, and the growing influence of extremist politics) and economic chaos (which did not happen in nearly the drastic manner that Rockwell had hoped; indeed, the American economy was strong enough to support both an ever-growing military engagement in Vietnam and the expansion of social programs and entitlements with the Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty), he would be propelled to power in 1972, the year he predicted he would be elected president. I think he clearly wanted to be the king of the radical, racist Right, and so started a movement that was essentially a personality cult.

One might ask why any American would be foolish enough to believe he could launch a political movement based on ideas that were, first, anti-democratic in a country that was fiercely committed to democratic values; second, European, and particularly Germanic, in a country that was leery of European values and beliefs and uneasy, at best, about Germany, a country with which we had engaged recently in a major war; third, anti-Christian in a country that was deeply committed to Christian values and ideals; and fourth, racist and anti-Semitic in a country that, whatever its racist past, no longer believed in the biology of race, was committed to egalitarian ideals, and did not feel, whatever the dislocations caused by changing race relations, that the solution to the race problem was more intensive or expansive racism.

Despite the turbulent times, Rockwell's movement flew in the face of the historical trends of the society in which he lived. He might have succeeded more than he did, but it is almost impossible to think, even if his movement had gotten far more notice than it did, that he would have been a major political force in a country where far less threatening "third parties" have found it difficult to sustain themselves. Even granting the intransigent racism of a good many whites, the United States was no more going to turn to Nazism to solve its problems than it was going to turn to communism.

This quixotic quality of Rockwell's movement, with equal measures of fantastic daring and pathological resentment, has enabled the racist Right to make a hero of him, something of a martyr (assassinated by one of his own followers, no less). But there is something about Rockwell's story— about his persistence in his beliefs and in his political activism—that seems heroic in a peculiar but genuine way, if only because one has to grant a man some measure of respect for sticking to his guns no matter what and for refusing to submit to the belief of the dominant mainstream that he was crazy because he adopted execrable political ideas (psychotherapy has sometimes be come a form of Stalinism in democratic, technological countries). And there is something tragic about Rockwell, a man of no small intelligence, no small ambition, no small abilities, who could waste himself so thoroughly in something so grotesque and so mean-spirited.

William H. Schmaltz's Hate and Frederick J. Simonelli's American Fuehrer are complementary books. Hate is a more thoroughgoing biography of Rockwell and his movement, giving detailed accounts of the various people who joined, Rockwell's day-to-day activities and public lecturing, a more comprehensive account of the denizens of the underground world of neo-Nazism and the racist Right. American Fuehrer, although it provides an account of Rockwell's life and considerable information about the racist Right, is largely concerned with American Jewry and the strategy of "quarantine" devised by Dr. Solomon Andhil Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee to contain Rockwell and to deny him what he craved most: publicity. As Rockwell said in 1961,

the problem in building a political organization … in spite of the enemy's utter mastery of all means of communicating with the masses, is … first the problem of reaching the masses—any way at all. It does not matter how you reach them at first, so long as they come to know of you and the fact that you are at the opposite pole from those in power.

Rockwell tried to achieve his objective of reaching people by baiting the Jews. He wore the Nazi uniform, displaying Nazi flags and swastikas everywhere when he spoke. He had a little dog that he introduced as "Gas Chamber." He talked about the need to exterminate the Jews, calling them "kikes," "blood-suckers," "degenerates." When a planned demonstration in New York's Union Square was opposed by Jews there who used political pressure to deny Rockwell a permit, he went to court, suing the city on the grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. The scene at the courthouse was utter pandemonium: hostile Jews surrounded Rockwell and his few storm troopers. It seemed likely that he would be physically assaulted.

The press covered all of this, of course: it made for dramatic news. And as long as Jews responded angrily and violently to Rockwell's baiting, so Fineberg reasoned, as long as they sought to use legal means to prevent Rockwell from speaking, they would be giving him the publicity he so desperately sought. To beat him up in public, to deny him the right to speak might even win sympathy for Rockwell and his cause. ("Why won't the Jews let him speak? What are they afraid of?" some were bound to say.)

It was only with considerable difficulty that Fineberg was able to convince the Jewish community, particularly more militant Jewish organizations like the Jewish Defense League and the Jewish War Veterans, to employ his policy of quarantine, that is, to ignore Rockwell. But slowly most came around to this way of thinking; the Jews also persuaded the media not to cover Rockwell.

He was never able to overcome this strategy. To begin with, his organization was not well-financed (both books provide good information on how Rock well raised money and how many members he had), and he found it difficult to attract more than 40 or 50 hardcore members. With neither membership nor money, it was vital that he get publicity. For instance, in August 1963, Rockwell had planned a counter-demonstration to occur on the same day as the March on Washington. He had hoped to attract perhaps 5,000 people. But this hope waned. He could get no major segregationist southerner like Wallace or Ross Barnet to attend. (They never answered his letters.) By the day of the march, he hoped for 500 or 1,000. About 75 persons actually appeared.

The very success of the quarantine, as Simonelli notes, raises questions about the real meaning of "free speech" in a democratic society. Do we have a duty to suppress vile, hateful speech? Should we be more unnerved by the effective way that Rockwell was quarantined than by his speech? Are the same tactics routinely employed to suppress speech that challenges powerfully en trenched interests, as critics like Noam Chomsky charge, so that the appearance of a vital marketplace of ideas is in fact a carefully managed facade?

Both Simonelli and Schmaltz see Rockwell as a seminal figure in racist right-wing politics. First, he created the White Power, or Pan-Whiteness, movement when he ran for governor of Virginia in 1965, a white unity movement that has become the basis for organizing on the racist Right. (He did not come close to winning the governorship.) Second, he was instrumental in launching and popularizing the idea of Holocaust denial. Third, Rockwell gave momentum to the Christian Identity movement, a loosely organized confederation of extreme racists that began in the 1940s.

He was denying the Holocaust as early as 1963 and 1964, several years before the publication of David Hoggan's The Myth of the Six Million in 1969. Of course, earlier books by neo-Nazis like Savitri Devi had obliquely denied the Holocaust (she was too obsessed with her pathological hatred of Christianity and democracy to be very concerned about the Holocaust; as a militant animal rights advocate, her position was "What's a few million miserable human beings compare to the slaughter of animals over the centuries?"). But Rockwell was brazen about it, always citing as evidence an article he wrote under a pseudonym in the late 1950s about the horrors of the concentration camps for a magazine called Sir!. The article was a complete fabrication, yet, Rockwell said, the Jewish publishers of the magazine printed it anyway. This was his "proof" that the Holocaust never happened.

The Christian Identity movement, numbering perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 today, teaches that the original He brews, the Israelites of the Old Testament, were whites, not Jews. Rockwell adopted this notion despite his loathing for Christianity, because he believed that Nazism would never gain ground in the United States if it remained openly hostile to Christianity.

Rockwell's pragmatic duplicity in such instances has led some to conclude that perhaps he did not really believe his own doctrines, that he was merely an opportunist. There is nothing in the record of either of these solidly researched studies to support that idea. Rockwell was, in every sense of the phrase, a true believer.

But why was Rockwell a Nazi? Why was he attracted to these particularly pernicious ideas? There was nothing in his background so melodramatic as to suggest he became a Nazi because of some terrible encounter with a Jew or an African American. He became a Nazi, converted, really, for much the same reason that other people convert: He found a set of ideas, a set of beliefs that explained the world more plausibly, more compellingly, more completely, than he thought possible. And he found a set of beliefs that so fulfilled him as a person that he felt he had a mission, a new self-awareness and a new self-forgetfulness.

Rockwell was born on March 9, 1918 in Bloomington, Illinois, the oldest of three children. His father, George Lovejoy "Doc" Rockwell, was a successful, highly egocentric vaudeville comic, whose relationship with his much taller son (Rockwell, at 6' 4" was nearly a foot taller than his father) was always strained. His mother, Claire Schade, who would be supportive of her son all of his life, had been a dancer since childhood.

Rockwell's parents divorced in 1924, and through the rest of his childhood he traveled to Maine in the summer to see his father, whom he idolized. His father was, on the whole, a fairly indifferent parent from whom his mother had a difficult time getting child support payments, although he made a considerable amount of money. Yet, as Simonelli writes, "Ironically, of the three Rockwell children, George Lincoln was the most like Doc in many ways. Beyond adolescent at tempts at copying his father, the Lincoln Rockwell his family remembers as a young man spoke loudly and in a rapid staccato—just like Doc; he was a talented cartoonist and mimic; he was al ways 'on.'" During the rest of the year, Rockwell lived with his siblings, his mother, and an overbearing aunt in Atlantic City.

After a peripatetic high school career, Rockwell wound up at Brown University, from which he did not graduate. He joined the Navy in March 1941, becoming a pilot. He never flew in combat but he did well in the service, eventually becoming a lieutenant commander. (Rockwell was always called "Commander" by his Nazi followers.) In April 1943 he married his first wife, Judith, by whom he had three daughters. She was apparently a bit too independent for Rockwell's taste, and she found him a bit too restless. After the war, Rockwell was unable to make a go of anything in civilian life, as he tried his hand at sign painting, photography, and publishing.

The Navy called him up in 1950 when the Korean War broke out. By this time, the marriage was already in deep trouble. He was stationed in Iceland in 1952 when he met Thora Hallgrimsson. In October 1953, they were married. She had a son by a previous marriage; he had three children by his second wife. But this marriage also failed. Rockwell had always been conservative in his political views; he hated egalitarianism. He grew up in households that were anti-black and anti-Semite, although not exceptionally so. As members of his family said to interviewers, their beliefs differed little from the beliefs of most whites at the time (the 1920s and 1930s). Racism was not nearly so socially or intellectually unacceptable as it was to be after World War II. Indeed, for most white Americans racism and anti-Semitism was socially correct and intellectually valid for about the first half of the twentieth century.

But Rockwell's restlessness pushed him further and further to the right, further into anti-Semitic and rabidly racist circles. During the Korean War, while working to get General Douglas Mac Arthur the Republican presidential nomination, he met a woman who convinced him that it was the Jews who were orchestrating the movement against Mac Arthur. This led him to read Hitler's Mein Kampf, an experience that transformed him powerfully into a confirmed anti-Semite and launched his ultra-right career. In 1958 he openly avowed Nazism.

These are the facts, but they still do not in any satisfactory way explain the man. Why was he so anti-egalitarian? Why did Hitler's book, so wordy, offering such hackneyed ideas from a leader who had ultimately failed in his mission, have such a profound effect on a man who just a few years earlier had joined the war effort against Nazism? After all, Mein Kampf was not the reason Hitler rose to power; most of his early followers thought it was an awful book, and relatively few Germans bought or read the book before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Did the Korean War make things clearer for Rockwell because we were fighting an ideology that was so much the opposite of American values, because we were fighting people of a different race (although we were also fighting for people of that same race)?

It is impossible to say. We may understand what a person believes. We may be able to trace the events, the circumstances, of how that person came to believe what he or she believes. But still why a person believes what he or she believes remains a profound mystery.

It is very good that these two books have appeared. Understanding Rockwell provides a fresh perspective on the 1960s. We have had more than enough talk about the Left during that transformative decade; we still need to more fully understand the Right and the 1960s. Rockwell was an important figure, more important than his small number of followers or his ignominious end might indicate. He gave the racist Right a more theoretical underpinning by linking it to Nazism. He provided it with a martyr. He certainly presaged a more successful crossover figure like David Duke. He was, ironically, despite his obsession with whiteness, a man of great, unrelieved darkness. What is frightening is that he mistook that darkness for the light.

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis

1. Incidentally, Rockwell emerged as a public figure at almost the same time as Malcolm X; the two men met on a few occasions. Rockwell thought Malcolm the most intelligent of all black leaders and he often praised him, as well as Elijah Muhammad, whom he called "the Adolf Hitler of the blacks," in speeches. Rockwell addressed a Nation of Islam Savior's Day convention in Chicago in February 1962.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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