The Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, 1928–1945
British-Israelism in America, fragmented at best, was left without any center after A. A. Beauchamp cast his lot with Christian Science in 1924. Although neither he nor the Christian Scientists of the Parent Church regarded Science and British-Israelism as incompatible, Beauchamp’s involvement in the Parent Church effectively removed him as a linchpin of Anglo-Israelism. His periodical, which had linked the disparate British-Israel groups in the United States, now turned to other matters.
The gap, however, was soon filled, indeed, in a manner beyond anything Beauchamp had contemplated. His de facto successor was a bland New Englander, Howard B. Rand, who would dominate British-Israelism in America from the late 1920s until the end of World War II. Rand brought a distinctive background and agenda to Anglo-Israelism, for he was a second-generation British-Israelite, reared in a home already committed to the doctrines. His father had been a reader of Totten’s work, and as a young man, Howard was promised five dollars by his father if he would read J. H. Allen’s Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright and write a book report on it.1
Rand’s British-Israel agenda set him apart from his predecessors, including Totten, Allen, and Beauchamp, for from the beginning, he was committed to creating a truly national movement, something more than merely a collection of local coteries. In the course of doing so, he also embraced political causes with a pronounced right-wing cast. This linkage had been anticipated in the career of Reuben H. Sawyer, described in the previous chapter. Sawyer, however, was less concerned with establishing links between British-Israelism and the Klan than he was with simultaneously advancing the separate interests of each, and in any case, his Klan career lasted only from late 1921 until sometime in 1924. Rand, an extraordinary organizer, single-mindedly pursued a coordinated set of objectives: to spread British-Israelism, to build a national organization, and to provide it with a political agenda. Rand thus emerges as a critical bridging figure between mainstream British-Israelism and its subsequent American variant, Christian Identity, for he completed the consolidation of British-Israelism in the United States while opening it to right-wing and anti-Semitic influences that were to be amplified in the postwar years.
Rand was born in 1889 in Haverhill, Massachusetts. In 1913 he received his bachelor of laws degree from the University of Maine, and over the next fifteen years combined legal practice with forays into insurance and construction. In 1927 the distinguished Canadian British-Israelite William Pas-coe Goard lectured in Haverhill, very likely under Rand’s auspices, for by the spring of the following year, Rand began organizing in the United States as the American representative of the London-based British-Israel World Federation. Beginning in New England, his work spread to Detroit by early 1930, when he met with a group of businessmen to establish a branch of his new British-Israel organization, the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. The federation held its first convention in Detroit in May 1930 and made the city its headquarters. Beginning in the following summer and fall, Rand set off on marathon organizing trips. If his own account is to be believed, he traveled eighteen thousand miles through the South; twelve thousand miles through the Middle West; and fifty thousand miles during eight months in the West.2
Anglo-Saxon Federation branches began to appear rapidly. By September 1930 there were enough members in California to warrant a state convention. An Oregon branch was organized early in 1931, almost certainly based on the earlier organization in Portland. The second convention, which Goard attended, was held in Chicago in 1931. At the Chicago meeting, Rand announced that the Totten Memorial Trust had turned over to the federation C. A. L. Totten’s unsold books, together with their cuts and printing plates, for a total of between five and six tons of material. In addition, Victor Morris Tyler, a trustee of the Totten Trust, was made a member of the federation executive committee. Thus in both tangible and symbolic terms, Rand made the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America the instrument for the continuation of Totten’s enterprises. Immediately afterward, branches were organized in Chicago, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Miami. A Pacific Coast District now covered not only California, Oregon, and Washington, but also Idaho, Nevada, and Utah. There were bookrooms in Los Angeles and Oakland and a weekly radio program in Los Angeles. In the late summer of 1932, a third convention was held in Philadelphia.3
Meanwhile, tracts and pamphlets were being issued at a prodigious rate. In the federation’s first two years, fifteen thousand pieces of literature were distributed; but between May 1930 and September 1931, fully forty-two thousand more appeared. Rand worked full-time for the federation without salary. But other factors were at least as important as Rand’s devotion and energy. The Great Depression, now at its height, made millenarian ideas of every stripe appear both more plausible and more attractive, for surely such suffering and disorder must presage a cosmic overturning. The federation said of the Depression that “prophecy has foretold such a time will come upon the world.” At the same time it asserted that if only the country would legislate “the [biblical] law pertaining to debts, interest and release … the co-operative system of Jehovah [would] completely remove the present depression.”4
Another factor was also responsible for the Anglo-Saxon Federation’s growth, the involvement in its affairs of William J. Cameron. Cameron and Rand apparently met at federation meetings in Detroit in 1930. He was certainly present at the Detroit convention in May of that year, when he was named to the federation’s executive committee. He served as the organization’s president in the mid-1950s and remained in leadership positions until the end of the decade.5
While Rand was a faceless functionary, Cameron was a public figure, indis-solubly linked to the career of the man he served from late 1918 until 1946— Henry Ford. Cameron had begun as a writer for Ford’s weekly, the Dearborn Independent. He became its editor in early 1921 and remained in that post until the paper ceased publication in 1927. However, by about 1920, Cameron had also begun to serve in a broader capacity as Henry Ford’s link with the media. He remained in complete charge of Henry Ford’s personal press relations from the mid-1920s until the early 1940s. Since Ford spoke little and was often incomprehensible when he did speak, Cameron became the indispensable interpreter and intermediary, bringing the great man’s thoughts to a public hungry for the wisdom of its premier industrial statesman.6
In addition to his involvement with Henry Ford, however, William J. Cameron was a committed British-Israelite. While it is not entirely clear how he acquired his religious bent, it was independent of his association with Howard Rand. Cameron was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1878. His family moved to
Michigan when he was nine but returned to Canada for his secondary and postsecondary education. This area was systematically covered by Edward Hine, who between 1885 and 1887 made countless appearances in Michigan and Ontario, including two weeks in Hamilton. Thus, it is entirely possible that Cameron, like Rand, received British-Israel teaching from his parents. In any case, by the time Rand met him, he was an accomplished lay preacher.7
Cameron brought substantial assets with him into the federation, including the prestige of his close and continuing association with Henry Ford, his public-relations savvy, and his network of contacts in the Detroit business community. He also had access to financial resources in a time of stringency, and even though the federation was plagued by rising deficits in the early Depression years, Cameron, as we shall see, became a source of financial support at a key juncture.8
From the perspective of the development of Christian Identity, however, Cameron’s chief contributions were of a different sort. In collaboration with Rand he facilitated the first systematic attempt to link British-Israel religious ideas with the political right. Unlike Reuben Sawyer, who pursued the two activities separately, the two men made a concerted effort to reach the political right with Anglo-Israel teachings. Cameron entered the federation already publicly identified with the most notorious program of anti-Semitic publications in American history. His presence at the federation’s helm, therefore, implied the compatibility of British-Israelism and anti-Semitism, and at one stroke undercut the philo-Semitism of Edward Hine.
The linkage with ultraconservative politics arose in September 1931. Rand was on his way back to Massachusetts from the federation convention in Chicago, and stopped in Detroit, where he met with Cameron. Since the formation of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, it had published a monthly newsletter, then titled merely the Bulletin, which would eventually grow into a slick-paper magazine, Destiny. Cameron suggested to Rand that the federation produce “a special issue of our paper sent out to the leading men in this country” and wondered how such a mailing list could be secured. Rand knew just the person to furnish such a list, a small-time conservative political operator named Fred R. Marvin. Marvin had “formed a Coalition of patriotic organizations… to fight subversive activities in America.” Rand and no doubt Cameron already knew Marvin, who had just delivered an address at the Chicago convention.9
Marvin was one of those who play out their lives on the margins of great events. He began as a newspaperman at the turn of the century, and later served as an aide to legislators and as a publicist. In 1924, he had played a bit part in Teapot Dome and was accused of attempting to smear Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana as an associate of “the radical element.” By 1928 he was publishing “daily data sheets” on persons and organizations “designed to destroy” the American system of government, a precursor to the blacklists of the 1950s. Along the way he was accused of using his blacklisting power to favor the more conservative elements within the Daughters of the American Revolution—a relative distinction, to be sure, but enough to lead some to suggest that Marvin was able to gain control of the DAR’s internal politics. In addition to these activities, Marvin founded or ran a number of conservative political organizations, particularly the Key Men of America and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies. It was presumably the latter’s mailing list that Rand was able to secure for Cameron’s project. In 1930, Marvin had told a group of army reserve officers that he had “documentary evidence that as far back as 1890 the movement to break down government and abolish national defense had started.” It must have given him some satisfaction to learn that the Anglo-Saxons, as instruments of God’s will, were now in a position to save the nation and eventually the world from such evil and subversion. Cameron agreed to finance the production of the special issue, to be distributed by the patriotic organizations to their members. The special issue came out in a printing of thirty thousand the following February, so that Rand’s British-Israel message could blanket the American right in the darkest days of the Depression.10
By this time, Cameron was a figure of some note on the right by virtue of his association during the 1920s with the Dearborn Independent. More especially, it stemmed from the Independent’s publication of a series of anti-Semitic articles that ran on a virtually weekly basis from May 22, 1920, until January 14, 1922. A selection of them later appeared in four volumes that together bore the title of the first (and most famous) of the articles, “The International Jew.” Cameron’s special association with the series was well known as the result of a highly publicized libel suit filed in 1925 by Aaron Sapiro. Sapiro’s suit did not in fact grow out of “The International Jew” series itself, which had already been concluded, but rather was a response to a second set of articles, “Jewish Exploitation of Farmer Organizations.” The Sapiro lawsuit went to trial in March 1927 and offered the first opportunity for an extended public examination of the Independent’s anti-Semitism. The trial was widely reported. Henry Ford engaged as his attorney Senator James A. Reed, Democrat of Missouri. Cameron himself was on the stand for fully six-and-a-half days. In his testimony, Cameron completely absolved Henry Ford of any responsibility for the Independent’s contents and insisted that he as editor was the sole determiner of what appeared. Although the suit ended in a mistrial, in July Ford apologized to the Jewish community and promised to cease publication of any anti-Semitic material. On December 30, 1927, he closed the Independent.11
Ford’s and the Independent’s foray into anti-Semitism took place against the background of growing anti-Jewish activities. These were of two separate but mutually reinforcing varieties. First, there was what David Gerber has referred to as “ordinary” anti-Semitism, which consisted of negative representations of Jews in popular culture; social, residential, and occupational discrimination; and random instances of physical and verbal harassment. These relatively unorganized forms of anti-Semitism grew through the first half of the twentieth century and did not begin to decrease significantly until after the Second World War. The second variety of anti-Semitism—the “extraordinary” form-consisted of explicitly anti-Semitic ideologies proposed as explanations for the problems of society, and the expression of these ideologies in political movements. Among them were the so-called “pseudo-agrarian” movements, which, beginning in the 1890s, sought to blame rural and small-town social dislocations on an urban, plutocratic conspiracy. More often than not, this cabal was identified as explicitly Jewish, and it became a convenient scapegoat for those troubled by departures from traditional social values. It was ironical that Henry Ford, himself an agent of some of these changes, became, along with the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, one of the principal voices for an anti-Semitic politics of resentment. Until the Sapiro case caused Ford to close the Independent, the weekly was the major media outlet for anti-Semitic ideology in America.12
The Sapiro case had two significant implications. First, its high public visibility, together with Cameron’s extensive testimony, meant that the articles and Cameron were closely linked in the public mind. The articles themselves constituted the first and widest American popularization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the czarist forgery that became the most famous anti-Semitic book of the twentieth century. Cameron was therefore known not merely as an anti-Semitic journalist but as one whose anti-Semitism was of a particularly virulent sort. Hence, by the time he became active in the Anglo-Saxon Federation, just three years after the trial, he was arguably one of the best known anti-Semitic writers in the country. An organization in which he played a leading role could reasonably be assumed to be either supportive of or at least compatible with the vision of a world Jewish conspiracy portrayed in the Independent.
Beyond that, however, there was a second implication to Cameron’s testimony, for it raised the question of whether his admission of responsibility was accurate. What did it say about Cameron’s personal views, Ford’s beliefs, and the editorial process at the Independent? It was argued by some that Cameron had, as it were, merely “fallen on his sword” in order to protect his employer, implying a commitment to “The International Jew” and similar articles that he did not feel. This was, in fact, the view that Cameron himself sought to cultivate in later years. When he participated in Ford’s Oral History project in 1952, he claimed not simply to have been marginal to the series but to have opposed it from the outset. However, his version, recounted after the other major figures had died, may charitably by characterized as disingenuous. He sought to place principal responsibility on the Independent’s first editor, E. G. Pipp, who had previously been Cameron’s boss at the Detroit News and had brought Cameron to the Independent. Cameron recalled that “the first I ever heard of the Jew intention was from Pipp. He was telling me that was what they were going to do and he seemed to be in agreement with it. I was in total disagreement with it. I said you can’t get away with anything like that in this country, just racial prejudice. It was after I was out there [at the Independent]. … I was the only voice in disagreement.” This scenario seems unlikely, however, since Pipp himself resigned in disgust in April 1920, and the series went forward under Cameron’s editorship with no discernible moderation in tone.13
Cameron always maintained that Henry Ford himself was largely ignorant of the project, the position he had taken at the trial and continued to take after Ford’s death: “I can’t recall Mr. Ford discussing a single point about them [the articles]. He did have a strong feeling about international financiers…. But about the details that were brought up by various investigators, I don’t think he even knew. I don’t know whether he ever read the stuff.” That Cameron would have continued to publish such controversial material without Ford’s explicit instructions seemed unthinkable to those who knew both men. Mrs. Stanley Ruddiman, a Ford family intimate, remarked that “I don’t think Mr. Cameron ever wrote anything for publication without Mr. Ford’s approval.”
Despite his eagerness to present himself as the lone opponent of “The International Jew,” Cameron conceded under an interviewer’s gentle prodding that he himself had written the initial article, but claimed not to be able to remember any of the other authors in the series of anonymous articles: “Well, there were various persons. I don’t know their names.”14
An interested observer of Cameron during the 1920s was the Nazi propagandist Kurt G. W. Ludecke. Ludecke was an early and devoted supporter of Hitler, who came to America after the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch debacle. He initially set himself up as a one-person, unofficial Nazi propaganda and fund-raising bureau. By 1932, with the Nazis on the verge of taking power, Ludecke was rewarded for his prior service by being made the party’s official representative in the United States, where the Nazis hoped to cultivate support. His recollections of those years were not written until the late 1930s, by which time his life had taken some unexpected turns. He had returned to Germany, been imprisoned in a concentration camp, escaped to the United States, left the party, and testified before Congress on his earlier activities.15
Ludecke met Cameron on at least three occasions: briefly on a visit in 1921, and for more extensive conversations in 1924 and 1927. When he read the Independent’s anti-Semitic articles, he leaped to the conclusion that the Nazi party could gain financial support from Henry Ford. He was never in doubt that Cameron had written the articles and that they accurately represented Ford’s views, although Ford consistently rebuffed Ludecke’s appeals for money. Immediately after Ford issued his retraction of the series and apologized to the Jewish community, Ludecke rushed to Cameron’s side, eager to find him “before he could make himself invisible.” He found the editor stunned and depressed. Ludecke tried in vain to get Cameron to publicly disavow Ford’s statement, “for the sake of historical truth,” but after a few moments, “his courage visibly [ebbed] again.” Nonetheless, he quotes Cameron as having said with some emotion that “it is certain that I for my part will never make any retraction. What I have written will stand. Not one thing will I take back. You can be sure of that.… I know Ford too well not to be absolutely sure that the views set forth … are still his views, and that he thinks today as he always did. I simply cannot understand his alleged statement.” Since Ludecke’s memoirs contain long stretches of conversation by a variety of figures in many settings, there is an excellent chance that in this case he placed his own paraphrasing in Cameron’s mouth. Nonetheless, the substance is sufficiently consistent with other evidence to make it credible, particularly in light of Ludecke’s vivid account of Ford’s refusal to contribute funds to the party.16
Both in his 1952 “Reminiscences” and elsewhere, Cameron himself left powerful clues that the views expressed in “The International Jew” articles were not merely Henry Ford’s but were Cameron’s own, as well. These clues fall into three categories, of significance not merely for an understanding of Cameron’s journalistic career but for an understanding of the role he played in the development of British-Israelism in the United States. There is, first of all, the equivocal manner in which he continued to regard the central source for the series, The Protocols of the Elders ofZion. Even thirty years later, he professed astonishment and a measure of respect for the auspices under which The Protocols were published: “They were printed by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the King’s printers…. The auspices were quite astonishing to me, [that] the King’s printers would publish them…. What astonished me was the quality of the publishers.” He balked at referring to The Protocols as a forgery: “I don’t know what they mean by forgery yet.” He conceded they might be called a “fiction,” but then remarked that “laid alongside actual happenings in the world, why… there was a similarity between what was written in the book and what had occurred here and there.” That Cameron would volunteer such observations in the 1950s suggests that his involvement with anti-Semitism in the early 1920s was neither nominal nor reluctant.17
In reflecting on the Independent’s articles, Cameron never seemed sure whether they were wrong because they were untrue or wrong because they had embarrassed him and his esteemed employer. As a public-relations man, he recognized that in retrospect the whole affair had been imprudent: “A manufacturing corporation has no right to enter into the publication of controversial matter.” On the matter of the articles’ truthfulness, he was equivocal, suggesting that while they were “untrue,” the series “was true in spots as far as actuality was concerned.” Ten years before the “Reminiscences,” in May 1942, his friend, the Canadian British-Israel writer Colonel W. G. MacKen-drick had asked Cameron’s opinion about a manuscript on the religious meaning of the Second World War. Cameron’s major criticism concerned MacKendrick’s harsh treatment of the Jews. Cameron, doubtless reflecting his own experiences with the Independent, observed that “no author is going to be read who promotes Anti-Semitism,” the words of someone governed more by prudence than by principle.18
If some clues can be derived from Cameron’s comments on The Protocols, and others from his reluctance to condemn unequivocally the Independent’s anti-Jewish campaign, a final and even more pertinent set of indicators comes from Cameron’s British-Israelism. His religious views were widely known at Ford, as well as in the greater Detroit area, where he was in demand as a preacher. An in-house Ford publication in the mid-1950s said of him: “His discourse on the Economic Law of Moses is a classic, and famous. He is an earnest student of what has been called the British-Israel movement; at its last national convention was elected National President.” In fact, the “discourse on the Economic Law of Moses” was an address, “The Economic Law of God,” that Cameron had given at Christ Episcopal Church in Dearborn, April 30, 1933, and that was published in periodicals of both the British-Israel World Federation and the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America.19
When Cameron preached, we may presume that he spoke only for himself, not for Henry Ford or the Ford Motor Company. His lectures and sermons were more muted in their racism and anti-Semitism than were his newspaper articles, and after the humiliation of the Sapiro trial in 1927, Cameron sought to protect himself from public scorn. His views, however, are unmistakable. In a set of lectures at the Dearborn Inn in late 1933, he elaborated on his view that the Bible is “a racial book,” and that “the racial question will never be properly stated, and its meaning will never be found, except on Biblical principles.” The Bible, according to Cameron, was the story of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” and he was careful to make clear that he was not using race as a synonym for nationality. Germans, Bohemians, Dutch, Scandinavians, and Britons “all belong to one race stream,” descended from the ancient Israelites. In a much-published presentation given in Detroit the following year, “What I Believe about the Anglo-Saxon,” Cameron described the Bible as “the only reliable racial guide I know” It tells the story, he went on, of the struggle of the race of Israel with its adversary, the “Esau race,” “an anti-Israel power that endures to this day.” The “Esau race,” once separate, had “amalgamated with the Jews, and began their terrible work of corrupting the Jewish religion from within.” This clearly drew not on the philo-Semitic tradition of Edward Hine but on the older notion of John Wilson’s that the Jews had been irrevocably contaminated by intermarriage with the Edomites, Esau’s putative descendants.20
Much the same material had already appeared in the Independent, where, alongside discussion of the Jewish conspiracy, there was a good deal of British-Israel doctrine. Examinations of the Independent have, understandably, focused on its anti-Semitic content rather than on its excursions into Anglo-Israelism. There is no reason to believe that any on the newspaper’s staff other than Cameron were British-Israelites. Hence, its theological slant may be wholly attributed to him, and we may reasonably presume that he wrote all British-Israel articles that did not carry a byline, and commissioned those that did.
Between May 1921 and April 1927, the Independent published ten articles with significant British-Israel content, the last three by named authors: Mark John Levy, a British Jew who had converted to Christianity; Paul Tyner, who also wrote for the Independent on Major Douglas’s Social Credit movement; and the Canadian British-Israelite, Colonel MacKendrick. The anonymous articles fell within the series of virtually weekly articles on the Jews’ capacity to create mischief in their host societies. For this purpose, British-Israel ideas had obvious advantages, since by seeming to prove that Jews were distinct from Israel, they could show that Jews were not “God’s chosen people,” were not of the same stock as Jesus, and had been subject subsequently to unique racial mixing that allegedly had obliterated their original links to the tribe of Judah.21
The article that appeared on Christmas Day 1920 was typical of the manner in which British-Israelism was integrated into the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy. The author (presumably Cameron) begins by distinguishing Judah from Israel, from which he infers that the Jews’ claim to chosenness “is not warranted by the Scriptures themselves.” The essay then moves swiftly to The Protocols, “the most perfect plan for the destruction of Christian society ever brought to light.” If, as Jews contend, The Protocols are a forgery, “let them prove” the book’s falsity. British-Israelism and The Protocols can now be brought together: members of the tribe of Judah were the mischief makers of ancient Israel, “its least progressive tribe,” characterized by “darkness and perversity,” a people with whom “the rest of their nation could not live.” Thus the enmity between Jews and Gentiles is rooted in conflict between Judah and Israel. The evil design of Judah/Jews must be unmasked through publication of documents such as The Protocols before further damage is done.22
The link between Cameron the anti-Semitic journalist and Cameron the British-Israel preacher is even clearer in a bizarre piece of parallelism. An anonymous 1923 Independent article observed that the prophet Jeremiah, although technically a Judean, must have been an Israelite, because “seldom is a Jew named ‘Jerry.’” A decade later, in an Anglo-Israel lecture at the Dearborn Inn, Cameron remarked that “though I have searched through many lists of Jewish names, I have never found a Jew named after this great prophet of Judah, Jeremiah.”23
Despite the openness with which Cameron expressed his views, at least one later author, Albert Lee, suggests that Cameron’s involvement in the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America generated so much negative publicity that the company forced him to step down from the organization’s presidency. This, Lee believes, accounted for the federation’s headquarters’ move from Detroit to Haverhill, Massachusetts. It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty why Cameron left the presidency and why the headquarters were changed. Most of Cameron’s correspondence at Ford has been lost or destroyed, including all that might have spoken directly to this issue. As already indicated, his oral history recollections were often inadvertently or willfully distorted, and in any case do not address his federation activities.24
Howard Rand himself was never president of the Anglo-Saxon Federation. While others held that office, Rand was content to bear more modest titles, such as national commissioner or general secretary. However, as the organization’s founder and full-time functionary, he, rather than the federation’s president, ran the organization. Further, Cameron had not been its only titular head; in 1923 Reverend Frank Hancock “was appointed Chairman to consider all matters pertaining to the Movement,” suggesting that at that point in its existence the federation did not have a president. In addition, in the early period dues continued to be paid to Rand’s office in Haverhill, although the decision to make Detroit the official center had been taken in 1930.25
Cameron was succeeded as president by A. F. Knoblock. Knoblock had been recruited as a result of the February 1932 mailing to members of Fred Marvin’s patriotic coalition. He was at the time an executive of the Bundy Tubing Company. By 1933 he was a member of the federation’s national executive committee and the head of an arrangements committee that organized an intensive series of meetings of the Detroit Anglo-Saxon Group in the spring of that year. That he rose to the presidency in 1937 was, therefore, not particularly surprising, and may simply have been the result of normal rotation. Certainly, there is no evidence that pressure on or from the Ford Motor Company was the reason, nor that the decision was Cameron’s rather than the organization’s. Although Rand insisted that the shift of headquarters to Haverhill was merely a matter of convenience, the way in which the change was announced in the January 1938 issue of Destiny suggests that the reasons for it were linked to the internal politics of the organization. In addition to making that announcement, the issue is the first to omit a list of staff members and officers. Only Rand is named as editor, suggesting some breach between him and the Detroit group.26
Cameron remained intimately involved with British-Israelism until the mid-1940s, long after he had ceased to occupy any position in the leadership of the Anglo-Saxon Federation. Through most of World War II, he was part of a three-way Anglo-Israel correspondence on the mystic eschatological meaning of the war and the manner in which pyramid calculations might predict the time and nature of the war’s end. Although Cameron’s side of the correspondence no longer exists, those of the other parties—Colonel MacKendrick and William McCrea—show that McCrea produced the interpretive materials and sent them to MacKendrick, who in turn passed them on to Cameron with his glosses. But despite Cameron’s continued British-Israel commitment, his ability to act effectively on its behalf diminished.27
Cameron’s star was declining at Ford, due in part to the rise in the company of the unscrupulous Harry Bennett, whose influence over Henry Ford brought him dominance not only over Ford’s labor policy but over large segments of its bureaucracy. Bennett loathed Cameron and was eager to see him go, but Ford remained loyal to Cameron, who stayed with the company longer than did Bennett. Nonetheless, Bennett began to assume increasing responsibility as an intermediary between Ford and the press, as did Ford’s public-relations and advertising firms and the company’s own news bureau. Cameron’s monopolization of media contacts with Henry Ford was broken by 1940. While he retained his office down the hall from Ford’s and continued to lunch daily with Henry and Edsel in the private dining room at the engineering laboratories, he ceased to be a power in the corporation by the early 1940s.28
Cameron’s problems went beyond company politics, for he was a heavy drinker whose attachment to the bottle grew worse with time. Mrs. Stanley Ruddiman suggests that Cameron may have had a drinking problem as early as his days on the Detroit News, when he needed to be “one of the boys” in a hard-drinking profession. By the time of his service at Ford, and particularly by the late 1920s, he was an alcoholic. There is some suggestion that he was able to curb his drinking just before and during the Sapiro trial, but he was drinking more heavily than ever after the trial ended. His responsibilities at the time remained substantial, even though the Independent had been closed. In addition to his role as press intermediary for Henry Ford, he was the company’s spokesperson on its radio program, the “Ford Sunday Evening Hour,” from October 1934 until March 1942. At its peak, in 1936-37, the “Sunday Evening Hour” attracted a national audience of 16–20 million for its programs of concert music. Midway in the broadcast, Cameron gave a six-minute homily on behalf of the company, a concoction of bromides on life and events. He delivered many of these platitudinous sermonettes in an inebriated state, but, like many alcoholics, he could give a reasonable imitation of sobriety when the need arose, and only those familiar with the natural timbre of Cameron’s voice knew by the telltale huskiness that he was in his cups. The company and N. W. Ayer, its advertising agency, routinely detailed men to make sure Cameron got to and from the broadcast, and a Ford functionary, Fred L. Black, was always on call to read Cameron’s script if needed. Ironically, that became necessary only when Cameron contracted the flu.29
None of this sat well with Henry Ford, a teetotaler, but he insisted that Cameron’s indulgence was a “sickness” from which he might in time be cured. He provided Cameron with an attendant when necessary, as well as medical care at Henry Ford Hospital. During Prohibition, Cameron was necessarily dependent upon bootleggers and speakeasies. Whenever Ford discovered a Cameron source, he had it closed down. This seems to have engendered a certain suspiciousness in Cameron, so that when he once met another Ford employee at a bootlegging source, he became enraged, certain the man had been sent by Henry Ford to spy on him.30
Cameron’s drinking problem had several implications for his role in British-Israelism. In the first place, insofar as it weakened his ability to fight corporate battles, it may have contributed to the decline of his influence at Ford, which in turn indirectly reduced his prestige outside the company. Second, it may well have caused friction between him and Howard Rand. Cameron’s alcoholism was particularly serious in the years of his contacts with Rand, which followed shortly upon the conclusion of the Sapiro trial. Rand, however, was a Prohibitionist. Indeed, in 1914, at the age of twenty-five, fresh out of law school, Rand had run for attorney general of Massachusetts on the Prohibition party ticket, and he retained this early temperance commitment. He ran again on the Prohibition party ticket in 1944, 1950, and 1952. As late as 1946, he wrote: “Jesus informs us that by their fruits we shall know them, and the fruits of the liquor traffic, saloon and tavern are far removed from righteousness…. [The] statement that no drunkard will inherit the Kingdom of God … [is] sufficient reason to question the accepted views of the school of thought that would use the Bible to justify their desire for intoxicating liquors.” Since Rand lived in Massachusetts, he met Cameron only intermittently, as the affairs of the Anglo-Saxon Federation required, and it is possible that Cameron concealed his alcoholism in their early contacts. But it is not plausible that he could have done so for a decade, nor that the rigid Rand would have taken as charitable a view as the paternalistic Ford. Recently, Rand authorized a staff member to state that the federation’s headquarters were moved from Detroit to Haverhill solely because it was Rand’s home. However, Rand’s cryptic announcement of the change in January 1938, explaining the shift as the result of “certain differences in policy [that] have arisen,” suggests some incompatibility, and it is possible that Cameron’s alcoholism may have played a role.31
Whether or not Cameron’s drinking was the cause of a breach between him and Rand, two points are clear. First, Cameron ceased to play a significant role in the federation after the late 1930s, although he remained committed to British-Israelism for some time thereafter. Second, Cameron eventually left British-Israelism altogether as a direct consequence of his drinking. As perhaps the most prominent American to have publicly championed British-Israelism, his defection was significant. The alcohol issue caused Cameron eventually to join the Missouri-based religious sect Unity. The introduction to Unity came through Cameron’s wife, who, despairing of his ability to become sober on his own, was attracted to the Unity movement’s program of prayer on behalf of those who solicited their help, the so-called practice of “Silent Unity.” Mrs. Cameron was sufficiently impressed with the Unity literature she read to attend two educational sessions at the Unity school, located outside Kansas City in Unity Village, Missouri. Cameron himself appears initially to have been uninvolved. However, in the mid-1940s he was shaken by his own heart and ulcer problems, no doubt exacerbated by heavy drinking, and by Henry Ford’s final illness. Cameron was “morose and unapproachable.” Henry Ford ceased active participation in the company in 1945. In April 1946 Cameron retired, and in 1947 Ford died. Ford’s death was the apparent catalyst in Cameron’s conversion. When his wife made her third trip to Unity in 1947, Cameron accompanied her.32
Thereafter, Cameron ceased drinking completely. As Mrs. Ruddiman put it: “He has had a rebirth…. He’s been born again. He knows now that his body is God’s temple.” The faith to which Cameron now clung was an offshoot of the turn-of-the-century New Thought movement, out of which Christian Science had also sprung. Founded in 1889 by Myrtle and Charles Fillmore, Unity emphasized healing through prayer. Unlike Christian Science, it was devoid of associations with British-Israelism. So complete was Cameron’s conversion that in his retirement he entered the Unity ministry. In 1949, he moved to Oakland, California, as assistant minister of a Unity church, the position he occupied when he died in 1955. In light of the conversion, his 1952 oral history interview, in which he sought to minimize the anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 1930s, may reflect both his desire to present himself in a more flattering light and perhaps his feeling that earlier religious positions were now of no consequence.33
Howard Rand’s situation was quite different, for Rand lived on to an extraordinary age. He died October 17, 1991, four months after his 102d birthday.
Nonetheless, his British-Israel activities peaked in the 1930s, the period of his association with Cameron. While the subsequent decline in his level of activity may be ascribed to age, the principal reason was undoubtedly the fact that British-Israelism in America found its most favorable environment in the uncertainties of the Depression. At a time when political, social, and religious orthodoxies were crumbling or under attack, even the most exotic alternatives were likely to get a sympathetic hearing. The message that Americans were indeed God’s chosen people, in a literal rather than merely a metaphorical sense, must have been solace to many who had begun to doubt the validity of the American experience.34
However, the institutional framework of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America decayed rapidly after the Second World War. Rand devoted his attention primarily to writing and editing rather than to organizing. Only in Portland, Oregon, where British-Israel activity predated Rand, did a branch survive, under the name of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Association of the United States of America. But it too eventually succumbed to an aging membership, and its periodical ceased publication in mid-1964, ending with the hope “that our thirty years of earnest effort has not been in vain.” The Anglo-Saxon Federation of America continued to maintain a paper existence. Its substantial and well-produced periodical Destiny appeared monthly until early 1969, when it briefly changed to a quarterly before ceasing publication altogether in the following year. Rand continued to issue pamphlets, however, as well as an Editorial Letter Service, which as late as 1983 claimed twenty-five thousand readers.35
It is often the curse of the long-lived either to sink into obscurity or to see his or her life’s work changed at the hands of others. Rand suffered a measure of both. While his longevity was a major factor, it was not the only explanation. He was, after all, only in his late fifties when the Second World War ended. But he clearly had developed a stronger preference for writing than for the tedious business of keeping the federation’s branches alive. His output was enormous. He wrote much of Destiny, together with a torrent of books and pamphlets. Not surprisingly, when the Depression and Cameron left the scene, the Anglo-Saxon Federation, without Rand’s scrupulous tending, withered. While Rand continued to be treated as a revered elder by those in the British-Israel fold, he became increasingly an object of respect rather than a vital force, the kind of person of whom it is said in awe and surprise, “Is he still alive.”
By the time Rand died, Christian Identity had cast off even the most nominal link with the British-Israel World Federation, whose American representative Rand had once been. He himself clearly regarded Identity as a deviation that he chose not to acknowledge by name, and he maintained significant theological disagreements with it in his old age (these will be discussed in part II). Nonetheless, in complex and significant ways Rand and the Anglo-Saxon Federation made Identity possible. First, they distributed large amounts of British-Israel materials on a national basis and brought its ideas to hitherto untouched audiences. Second (and here the linkage with Cameron was paramount), they created a movement in which racists, anti-Semites, and those generally on the political right felt welcome. Third, they built an Anglo-Israel infrastructure, a network of publications and local organizations that, although they did not survive their founder, did last long enough to become the foundation for Identity activities later. In particular, the federation facilitated critical contacts between American British-Israelites on the West Coast and their opposite numbers in western Canada. As the next chapter will show, these U.S.-Canadian contacts, begun in the late 1930s, were an important mechanism for introducing an even more intensely anti-Semitic theology than anything Cameron or Rand had contributed. Given the chronic inability of British-Israelism to enforce an orthodoxy, the motifs that filtered down from Vancouver through Rand’s network made possible the creation of that American variant we know as Identity.