Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew (review)

Kathleen Belew begins her book by defining the term “white power” as a “social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995” (p. ix). She then has chapters that trace the beginning of the movement, paramilitary training camps, unification of the movement in the late 1970s, intersections between white power and other forms of paramilitarism, the 1983 declared white power revolution, and eventual encounters with state power—Ruby Ridge, Idaho, siege of the Branch Davidians in Texas, and the Oklahoma City bombing.

The origin of the modern white power movement, writes Belew, was the Vietnam War. Many of the movement’s leaders were veterans, and according to their common belief, the federal government sent American boys to Vietnam and denied them the military force to win it. “Many met gruesome injury or death, and all faced hardship. . . . No one appreciated the service they had given their country. Those left behind as prisoners of war were abandoned and forgotten, and those who returned were denied both homecoming parades and their proper place in public memory” (p. 23). To make matters worse, the stagflation of the 1970s meant that many could not find decent jobs, and then the Carter administration admitted hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” into the United States.

That had an impact on the Texas Gulf Coast, where many Vietnamese settled and continued their profession fishing crab and especially shrimp. White power journals and Klansmen spread rumors: the shrimp population was declining; the Vietnamese had smuggled American gold out of Vietnam; they were eating neighborhood pets; they actually were Vietcong! “There are a number of Vietnam veterans like myself who might want to do some good old search and destroy right here in Texas,” wrote Louis Beam. “I’m ready” (p. 54). Violence ensued until the government stepped in to protect the refugees.

Belew spends a chapter on an incident in Greensboro, North Carolina, in November 1979. Neo-Nazis and Klansmen fired into communist-organized African American protesters, killing five and wounding seven. In the subsequent trial, the all-white jury found the white men not guilty, and the “white power movement took the acquittal as a green light for future action” (p. 72). Moreover, the “Greensboro shooting had the effect of consolidating and unifying the white power movement” (p. 75).

The author includes an interesting chapter on white women, where she writes that white power advocates felt their enemies “wanted to abort white babies, admit immigrants, allow people of color to have unlimited children on the government’s welfare dime, allow black men to rape white women, and encourage interracial marriages” (p. 159).

In the finale, Belew writes, “Within and beyond the white power movement, the siege of Ruby Ridge—along with the 1992 Los Angeles riots that preceded it and the fiery, catastrophic end to the Waco standoff that followed in 1993—inflamed a renewed apocalyptic imaginary, a worldview characterized by intensifying urgency that would eventually lead to the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City” (p. 188).

Belew has produced an excellent book on a neglected topic. Her research is judicious. She has employed numerous secondary sources, government documents, mainstream newspapers, along with three dozen newspapers and newsletters from white power groups. Some actors are familiar, like David Duke, but most are not—Louis Beam, Tom Posey, J. R. Hagan, Don Black—and readers learn about various organizations from the Civilian Military Assistance to Order to the White Patriot Party. This is a superb book—the one to read on the modern white power movement.