Beginning in the late 1930s, Anglo-Israelism underwent the final set of organizational transformations that produced Christian Identity. The ties to the original movement in England—nurtured by Totten, Beauchamp, and Rand—became attenuated to the point of rupture. By the beginning of World War II, and certainly by the war’s end, what remained was a distinctively American movement. It might contain doctrines of English provenance, but organizational ties to the British-Israel World Federation had ended and such terms as “British-Israel” and “Anglo-Israel” had themselves fallen into disrepute. These changes were tied to two other transformations, one geographical, the other doctrinal.
American British-Israelism experienced a change in geographical focus beginning in the late 1930s. The movement had originally been centered in the Northeast, with Joseph Wild in New York, Charles Totten in New Haven, A. A. Beauchamp in Boston, and Howard Rand in Haverhill, Massachusetts. There were secondary centers in the Middle West (e.g., Eshelman in Illinois, J. H. Allen in Kansas), greatly strengthened in the Depression era with William Cameron’s ascendancy in Detroit. However, the movement had not achieved much prominence in the West. There had been, it is true, an active group in Portland associated with Reuben H. Sawyer, and Rand had organized assiduously in California beginning in the late 1920s. But notwithstanding these outposts, the movement’s center of gravity remained northeastern and mid-western.
By the late 1930s, however, that had begun to change. In part it was a matter of old areas weakening. As the Depression ended, recruitment became more difficult. Cameron, as we saw in chapter 3, began to withdraw from leadership, possibly as the result of disagreements with Rand. Rand himself ceased to put as much time into organizing and became more involved with writing and editing. But whatever changes might be attributed to the decline of strength in the East and Midwest, the major sources of change came in the West itself. Along the Pacific Coast, British-Israelism began to grow and change as a result of two factors.
First, a vigorous British-Israel group in British Columbia began to push down the coast. At a point when American energies were flagging, this Canadian influence produced a burst of activity, first in the Pacific Northwest and later in California. Second, demographic changes and religious developments in Los Angeles created an increasingly receptive climate for Anglo-Israel activities. Indeed, these changes are partly reflected in the American folklore of the period that identified southern California with bizarre forms of religious expression. By the late 1940s, a critical mass of British-Israel-related groups were active in Los Angeles and adjacent areas, most now so distant from British origins that Christian Identity can conveniently be dated from this time and place.
In addition to the change in geographical focus, British-Israelism in the West exhibited subtle but significant doctrinal alterations, concerned primarily with the view of Jews and the movement’s political orientation. As chapter 7 describes in greater detail, even “mainstream” British-Israelism harbored latent anti-Semitic tendencies, which developed from British-Israelism’s core belief that Judah and Israel were different. These tendencies became especially prominent in the 1940s among Vancouver British-Israelites. This may partly be ascribed to rising anti-Zionism in Anglo-Israel circles, since the desire of Jews for an independent homeland in Palestine was seen as repudiation of the British peoples’ claim to be the true Israel. It was well and good for Britain, as the mandatory power in Palestine, to aid Jewish settlement pater-nalistically, quite another matter for the Zionist movement to demand British withdrawal. In addition, the Vancouver group appears to have contained some figures whose anti-Semitism was unusually open and intense.
The openness of anti-Semitism in these circles represented a new phase, beyond that which had characterized the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. The presence of William Cameron in the leadership of the federation, and his identification with the Dearborn Independent and the Protocols, had signaled the compatibility of British-Israelism with radical anti-Semitism. However, these themes still remained subordinate in the federation. On the West Coast, they were to become increasingly central and, moreover, began to take forms beyond anything with which Cameron or Rand had been associated. One begins to find, for the first time, the suggestion that the Jews might be more than simply an unassimilable or evil force, but rather the very quintessence of evil, the literal offspring of Satan.
This new and more virulent strain of anti-Semitism came also to be more frequently linked with right-wing political causes. Rand and Cameron had explored this as well in their association with Fred Marvin during the Depression, but as with their anti-Semitism, the right-wing linkages had been occasional and unsystematic. During the 1940s in Los Angeles, Christian Identity established systematic and pervasive ties with right-wing political circles. At the center of these networks stood the doyen of American anti-Semitism, Gerald L. K. Smith. The story of Christian Identity in southern California can be told largely through the activities of Smith’s associates. One of these—a former Methodist named Wesley Swift—became by the 1950s and 1960s Christian Identity’s central figure. Identity’s development in the 1970s and 1980s was largely a function of those influenced in one way or another by Wesley Swift’s writing and preaching. By the time Swift died in 1970, therefore, Christian Identity had separated from its English roots; was developing most vigorously in southern California; and promulgated a theology of battle against demonic Jews and a political program of racial supremacy.
A major force in disseminating British-Israelism on the West Coast was a group centered in Vancouver. Anglo-Israelism had taken root in eastern Canada in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ontario, but took longer to penetrate the western region. An organization was established in Vancouver, however, in July 1909 called the British Israel Association. By 1922 there were four branches in the Vancouver area, amalgamated under the name of the British Israel Association of Greater Vancouver. By the early 1930s, the Greater Vancouver organization began to think in Canada-wide terms and began organizing a Dominion Federation, unaware that a similar effort was underway in Toronto. The Vancouver effort was eventually dissolved in favor of the Toronto-centered federation, but the tension between eastern and western Canada was to surface again.1
Through much of this period—at least from 1919 on—there had been contacts between the Greater Vancouver group and smaller British-Israel coteries in the Pacific Northwest. As we saw in chapter 2, Reuben H. Sawyer had, in addition to his Klan activities, propagandized vigorously for British-Israelism not only in Oregon and Washington, but also in British Columbia. Sawyer’s role as a founder of the British-Israel World Federation in London positioned him in an international network that included Canadians as well as Britishers and Americans. Nonetheless, the links between the United States and the Vancouver group were informal rather than systematic, the result of personal ties and proximity rather than policy. This was about to change.
Although the Vancouver association had relinquished its claim to organize the movement for all of Canada, it was not in the end pleased with the direction the Toronto group had taken. In 1935 the Dominion organization in Toronto, now called the British Israel World Federation (Canada), decreed that “no group in the Dominion of Canada is, or can be recognized as belonging to the British Israel World Federation excepting as they are registered through the Canadian organization.” This shift from a loose federation to a centrally governed organization appeared to threaten the independent programming that had characterized activities in Vancouver, with its radio programs, publications, and branches. In addition, between 1934 and 1937 key figures in Vancouver who had direct access to federation leaders in London died. The Vancouver association, fearful that its independence was threatened and unable to rescind the centralization policy, effectively withdrew from the federation in Toronto by 1937 and ceased to be recognized by the umbrella group in London. Isolated from the rest of Canadian British-Israelism and cut off from the London organization, the Vancouver group turned its attention to the United States.2
The Vancouver association began to systematically cultivate contacts on the West Coast. The principal vehicle was a series of conferences between 1937 and 1947 that was an important catalyst for the eventual emergence of Christian Identity. The first conference, in May 1937, was called the Convention of the Anglo-Saxon Association of North America, made up of the western segment of Howard Rand’s Anglo-Saxon Federation of America and the British-Israel Association of Greater Vancouver. The meeting, held in Seattle, drew from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, and British Columbia. Rand himself attended, and so did Reuben Sawyer. Thirty representatives came from British Columbia, including the Vancouver leadership and Clem Davies, a Victoria clergyman who later operated out of Los Angeles. For its part, Rand’s group resolved that “the Regional Convention of the Northwest District of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, desires and hereby enters into a friendly and reciprocal affiliation with the [Greater Vancouver] Association for the purpose of co-operating together in the free exchange of guest speakers and in order to mutually further the interests of the Kingdom of God in our respective territories.” Subsequent meetings were held in Vancouver in 1939-40, in Portland in 1941-43, and in Los Angeles in 1945-47. The result was a Canadian-American network that stretched from Vancouver to southern California, independent of activities in Toronto, London, and the eastern United States.3
When the Vancouver group shifted its attention from east to south, from Canada to the United States, the consequences were more than merely organizational; the Vancouver group nurtured ideas that were more clearly conspiratorial and anti-Semitic than what might be found in the run of British-Israel literature. In the early and mid-1940s, Vancouver-based writers produced a stream of apocalyptic and anti-Semitic materials that could now be diffused along the lines of communication that had been established with the United States.
This literature had two main components. The first was a series of books and pamphlets that reached its climax in a pseudonymously authored novel, When?: A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future, by “Ben Judah,” published in 1944 by the British-Israel Association of Greater Vancouver. This work stands as one of the first statements of what was to define Christian Identity doctrine, the belief that the Jews are the offspring of Satan. Because of its significance, it will be examined at length in chapter 9. When? was preceded by two pamphlets, which, although published with no indication of authorship, almost certainly came from the same hand. They share motifs and subject matter, as well as an elaborate “Chart of Racial Origins.” The first version, The Morning Cometh, issued in Vancouver in 1941 by the otherwise obscure Anglo-Saxon Christian World Movement, is a relatively unexceptional apocalyptic tract with little overtly anti-Semitic material. But an augmented edition, published in 1944 by the association, was quite different. This version, When Gog Attacks, is closely related in subject matter to When?, published the same year, save that When Gog Attacks employs the traditional format of a religious tract rather than the novelistic devices of When? When Gog Attacks presents a number of themes crucial in subsequent Identity thinking: Cain as the founder of the “synagogue of Satan”; the “Turko-Mongol” origins of Ashkenazic Jews; the blood of fallen angels among Jews; and the historicity “The Protocols of the Elders ofZion. As the pamphlet’s author concludes, “The Ashkenazim are neither Jews nor Semitic by blood or race.”4
If one part of the Vancouver group’s literary production was the work of the When? author, the other principal contribution came from a clearly identifiable source, C. F. Parker. Parker had impeccable British-Israel credentials. His father, J. W. Parker, was an early member of the Vancouver group, part of its executive committee by 1924, and a delegate to the 1937 Seattle conference. His son had studied at the British-Israel teacher’s training college in England. C. F. Parker exemplified a hidden but increasingly significant strand of anti-Semitism within British-Israelism itself. Where British-Israelites had previously emphasized a fraternal, although patronizing, relationship with the Jewish people, this philo-Semitism was increasingly challenged from two quarters: by those who argued that sinful out-marriage had corrupted Jewry’s All-Israel blood, and by those resentful of Zionism’s opposition to British rule in Palestine. Parker gave full vent to both views.5
The blood of Esau and his descendants, the Edomites, had infiltrated and corrupted the Jews. They were now a tainted people: “Esau-Hittites comprise no small portion of modern Jewry; and … we must be prepared to look for the continuation of Esau-Edom within the Jews.” Worse, these racial tendencies had spawned all manner of subversive and revolutionary forces, notably communism and Zionism, with the result that by 1948, “Palestine Jewry … a Communist and Atheist-ridden monstrosity,” had “seized the Holy Land from the rightful owners—Israel-Britain.”6
Consequently, the Vancouver Anglo-Israelites, now connected far more directly with Americans in the West than with fellow Canadians, became a catalyst and a conduit, at once stimulating the growth of British-Israelism on the Pacific Coast and infusing the anti-Semitic doctrines of Parker and the When? author.
The Vancouver group’s influence made itself felt initially in Washington and Oregon, but in time British-Israel activity accelerated in California as well, and in the Los Angeles area in particular. This was due in part to the gradual diffusion of Canadian influence southward but also because of changes in the composition of the population in Los Angeles itself. Between 1890 and 1930 Los Angeles was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and with its extraordinary population increase came greater social and religious diversity. The religious diversity is difficult to measure, but Gregory Singleton concludes that “the activity of cults in Los Angeles may have been more intense than in other cities.” Certainly, the area acquired a national reputation as a hotbed of religious novelty and experimentation. Between 1920 and 1930—the decade immediately preceding the upsurge in West Coast British-Israelism—small sects and cults in Los Angeles grew by 381 percent. These deviant religious organizations recruited not only from recent migrants to the city but from members of Protestant denominations seeking greater religious fulfillment.7
These shifts in population and religious affiliation provide the background for the growth of Anglo-Israel and, eventually, Christian Identity activities in southern California. British-Israelism came in part through its own organizations and in part as the doctrinal baggage associated with other groups. The most significant of the latter were the Pentecostalists. As we have already seen, Pentecostalism’s founder, Charles F. Parham, had been profoundly influenced by British-Israel ideas early in his career. With the Azusa Street Revivals of 1906, Los Angeles became a major locus of Pentecostalism, and by 1924, if not earlier, Parham was preaching there on British-Israel themes.8
By 1930, Howard Rand’s Anglo-Saxon Federation had a state organization in California, headquartered in Los Angeles. A key figure in the federation’s California operation was Philip E. J. Monson, state secretary in the fall of 1930 but by the end of the year district superintendent for the Pacific Coast, with authority over California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Monson appears to have been a British-Israelite since at least 1928, before Rand recruited him for the federation, and was associated with, and may have founded, the Kingdom Bible College, established in Los Angeles the same year Monson became active in the Anglo-Saxon Federation. Monson’s Covenant Evangelistic Association proclaimed itself “an international undenominational movement composed of Spirit-filled Christians” who anticipated “the near return of the Lord Jesus Christ to take up His Kingdom Administration.”9
By 1935, a colorful southern evangelist with British-Israel views, Joe Jeffers, set up shop in Los Angeles and may simultaneously have been active in William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion. By the early 1940s Los Angeles had also attracted Clem Davies, a prominent British-Israel preacher from Victoria, British Columbia. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles, Davies had a long right-wing and anti-Semitic past, including involvement with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and sympathetic statements about the Silver Shirts and the British fascists. William Dudley Pelley disdained British-Israelism and took no role in its organized manifestations. He was, however, profoundly influenced by one of its major figures, pyramidologist David Davidson. He turned Davidson’s ideas in directions neither their author nor other British-Israelites would have approved, but Pelley did perform two functions in the emergence of Christian Identity: he popularized Davidson’s writings among his followers, and he integrated Davidson’s work into an unabashedly anti-Semitic political movement.10
The Silver Shirts’ founder claimed to disdain British-Israelism. However, in the early and mid-1930s, he had appropriated parts of it for his own eclecticideology, a mixture of fascism and mysticism. His fondness for the occult led him to the pyramid literature, which served him, as it had others, as a device for predicting critical events. Since he remained aloof from organized Anglo-Israelism and incorporated only a small and arguably minor part of its beliefs, the use he made of pyramidism will not be considered here. It will, however, be examined in chapter 5, along with other British-Israel scenarios of the Last Days.
Los Angeles’s position in the movement was ratified when it served as the site for the final conferences of Canadian and American British-Israelites in 1945, 1946, and 1947. They were organized by John A. Lovell (1907-74), a Texas Baptist who became acquainted with British-Israelism in the 1930s. He established a magazine, Kingdom Digest, in 1941, pastored a church in Long Beach, and extended his ministry through radio broadcasts. He returned to Texas in 1946 and established the United Israel World Fellowship in Fort Worth. During his brief time in Los Angeles, however, he helped make it the center of organized Anglo-Israel activities in the West.11
Although Lovell departed quickly, the vacuum was soon filled. As British-Israelism was slowly metamorphosing into Christian Identity, its center was a figure at once logical and improbable: Gerald L. K. Smith. Smith had begun his political career as Huey Long’s chief lieutenant. Unable to hang on successfully to the Kingfish’s political legacy after Long’s assassination in 1935, Smith began to adopt positions that were increasingly radical and, after 1942, increasingly anti-Semitic. He made his first visit to Los Angeles in 1943 and came every year thereafter. In the early 1950s, he purchased a home in Los Angeles and moved his headquarters to the city in 1953. None of this would be of more than peripheral significance but for the fact that Smith’s activities intersected with those of most of the significant Identity figures on the West Coast—among them, Conrad Gaard, Jonathan Ellsworth Perkins, Bertrand Comparet, William Potter Gale, and, above all, Wesley Swift.12
Gerald L. K. Smith’s network was not British-Israel, it was unambiguously Christian Identity. Ties with the original group in England were now virtually nonexistent. Much of the organizational work in California had been done by Howard Rand, with London’s blessing, fifteen years before the activities of Smith and his colleagues. But Rand himself was a continent away in Massachusetts, and far more interested in writing than in organizing. The early figures on the West Coast, such as Sawyer and Monson, had either moved away, died, or were too old to continue in leadership roles. Many of the pivotal figures in California between the 1940s and the 1970s therefore had no prior involvement with the British-Israel World Federation or groups directly tied to it. In a movement that had always had difficulty in defining orthodoxy and suppressing deviation, those on the West Coast felt themselves at liberty to borrow, modify, and discard doctrines as their own idiosyncracies dictated. The early phases, marked by the activities first of Rand and then of the Vancouver group, had propagandized and brought believers together, but now the West Coast coteries took on lives of their own, building upon but not beholden to the work of earlier organizers.
The significance of Gerald L. K. Smith was threefold. First, Smith was by the 1940s, and remained until his death in 1976, the most prominent anti-Semite in America. His involvement with Identity therefore recapitulated the role that had been played earlier by William J. Cameron. The association of Cameron with British-Israelism in America, and then Smith with Identity, signaled the linking of religion with anti-Semitism. But whereas Cameron muted his anti-Semitism after the dissolution of the Independent, and in any event saw his primary loyalty to Henry Ford, Smith was under no such constraints. He was a full-time propagandist, speaker, and organizer whose influence was a function of the stridency of his rhetoric.
Second, although Smith frequently dealt with religious issues (a point explored further below), he saw his major role as that of political agitator pursuing a right-wing agenda. This agenda was compounded of opposition to the United Nations and other internationalist initiatives, opposition to “communism,” loosely defined, and opposition to expanded rights for blacks. Encompassing it all was an obsessive fear of Jewish subversion. The single-mindedness with which Smith pursued his political efforts had a special significance for Christian Identity. Howard Rand had made contacts on the right through Fred Marvin, but they were not systematically built up and sustained. Reuben Sawyer had had an active career with the Klan but kept his Klan activities separate from his religious role. Smith was intent on mobilizing Christian Identity figures in the West on behalf of his own political goals. The consistency with which Smith drew on Christian Identity support linked Identity strongly with the program of the anti-Semitic right.
Third, Smith gave coherence to a fragmented movement. Permissive at best, British-Israelism and derivative groups were always in danger of falling into anarchic and fratricidal strife. By assiduously cultivating prominent Identity figures and using them as vehicles for his political causes, Smith helped shape an Identity network on the Pacific Coast, something far too loose to be called an organization but nonetheless a coherent set of interacting and collaborating churches and individuals.
In view of all Smith contributed to Identity, a significant question remains: was he an Identity believer himself? Although the answer may seem obvious in view of his richly textured Identity connections, it is in fact not at all clear. His biographer, Glen Jeansonne, believes he was, based upon the strong Identity views Smith expressed in a 1964 letter. Smith and his Christian Nationalist Crusade also sponsored events that were at least as concerned with Identity doctrine as with politics. A 1956 lecture by Wesley Swift, “The Middle Eastern Crisis in the Light of the Scriptures,” Smith promised, would be “one of the richest and rarest experiences of your life.” The following year he asked Swift to “speak on the subject ‘The Divine Destiny of Our Race’ drawing heavily on the Scriptures.” Smith was fulsome in his praise of Swift and his Identity approach to the Bible: “I covet for you and the Israel cause the establishment of a permanent work in Los Angeles that forever will keep alive in the hearts of the people the Scriptural truth concerning the destiny of the white race, the identity of Israel, and other great messages embraced by your fellowship.” Near the end of his life, Smith claimed that, over and above all of Swift’s political contributions, the “greatest contribution” he made to Smith was that “he opened up the Bible…. He identified the ‘true Israel’ which gave us the Messiah, and demonstrated to me with the proper texts that Christ’s worst enemies were not God’s chosen people. He identified the ‘true Israel’ which gave us the Messiah, and demonstrated to me … we were indeed Israelites. … He demonstrated that the crucifiers of Christ were apostates, sons of Satan, and the seed of Cain.” Although Smith’s periodical, The Cross and the Flag, was mostly concerned with political issues, Smith regularly wrote religious articles. These included the views, by now increasingly common in Identity circles, that the Jews “are not necessarily offspring of the seed of Abraham,” that they had intermingled with the Canaanites, and that they are “sons of Satan.”13
While all of this would argue strongly for Smith’s commitment to Identity, there is also evidence that points in the other direction. Much of it comes from religious articles in The Cross and the Flag, although by implication rather than direct assertion. Smith rarely opened the magazine’s pages to his many Identity associates, at least not for religious articles, although a bland essay by Bertrand Comparet did appear in April 1955. In the same articles that link Jews with Canaanites and Satan, Smith also defined chosenness in decidedly non-Identity terms. The chosen “are those who have manifested their love of [Christ] by their faith, their repentance, their confession and their baptism. I humbly boast that I am of the House of Israel because I have accepted the Divine seed of Abraham fulfilled in its divinity through the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Spirit.” And elsewhere, “The real land of Israel belongs to those who have accepted Christ.” Considering how much Smith wrote, and how close his ties with Identity figures were, it is remarkable how few Identity references occur in his publications, and how much of his religious writing maintains the orthodox view that “Israel” consists of all those who have accepted Jesus as Savior. The ambivalence remained even in Besieged Patriot, the collection of “autobiographical episodes” he wrote a few years before his death. Here, along with encomiums to Wesley Swift, were a host of theologically orthodox, non-Identity observations: that “the true Israel is made up of the people who accepted and praise Jesus Christ as the Son of God,” that God’s chosen people are those “who have chosen to approach God by way of the name of Jesus Christ.” His seven-point list of the “fundamentals of the Christian faith” says nothing that sounds remotely like Identity.14
There are a number of possible explanations for this mixed record. The most cynical is that Smith was anxious to flatter potential supporters so that he could exploit them, and recognizing the anti-Semitic strand in Identity, did what was necessary to curry favor with its leading exponents. A less cynical but still nonreligious explanation is that Smith recognized in Identity a group whose interests at least partially coincided with his, particularly insofar as both advanced anti-Semitic ideas, and that he therefore behaved at least some of the time in ways necessary to remain in the good graces of a valued constituency. Alternatively, and more plausibly, Smith may simply have been so theologically unsophisticated (he certainly believed he knew more about theology than he did) that he was unaware of his own inconsistencies and was untroubled by the incoherence of his religious views. Smith had started out as an evangelical preacher, and thrived on platform virtuosity. Jeansonne remarks that his religious views were “highly opinionated and unconventional,” and it is possible that he was happy to borrow from Identity to buttress his anti-Semitism without feeling the need to recast his broader religious views in Identity terms. Whatever the case, even those who accept Smith as an Identity believer find it difficult to point to a single sustained instance of Identity writing from his pen. His importance lay rather in the role he performed as a link between the disparate elements of the West Coast Identity community.15
At one time or another, Gerald L. K. Smith had contact with virtually every significant Identity figure in the country, and particularly with those in the West. While it is not possible to exhaustively track all of his Identity affiliations, an examination of some of the principal relationships will provide some sense of how complex the interconnections were. In the absence of central organization, the links through Smith provided some measure of coherence for the movement during the growth period of the 1940s.
Among those in Gerald Smith’s circle, Conrad Gaard was a relatively marginal figure, if only because, based as he was in Washington State, he was less able to participate in Smith’s California activities. Gaard, however, deserves consideration because, as we shall see at a later point, he was among the first Identity figures to make a sustained written presentation of Identity views, and he was also among the first to present at length the view that Jews were the literal offspring of Satan. Although Gaard taught at a short-lived British-Israel seminary in Dayton, Ohio, during the late 1940s, his base was in Tacoma, Washington, where he led the Christian Chapel Church and the Destiny of America Foundation. He was an active religious broadcaster and issued a regular publication, the Interpreter. Gaard spoke widely in the United States and western Canada, where he maintained ties with the Vancouver group. He died in 1969.16
Gaard was in contact with Smith at least as early as 1946, and remained in touch with him both directly and through Wesley Swift for at least a decade. Smith was anxious that Gaard address the 1950 convention of his Christian Nationalist party in Los Angeles, something Gaard was unsure he could do given his extensive publishing, broadcasting, and travel commitments, although in the end he participated, advertised as a “Lecturer of influence.”17
Smith had a far closer but also far more tormented relationship with Jonathan Ellsworth Perkins. Perkins was raised as a Methodist in rural Ohio, although he eventually had ties to the Assemblies of God and Aimee Semple McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1930s, where he seems to have been based until sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when he transferred his activities to Tulsa. He met Smith in 1945, when both were in San Francisco attacking the founding of the United Nations. Perkins was firmly in the Anglo-Israel/Identity fold: “I shall not deny that I believe that the White nations of Western Europe are the lost ten tribes of Israel, and an integral part of Israel.”18
In addition to his association with Smith, Perkins was closely allied to members of the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party that had bolted the 1948 convention and formed the States’ Rights Democratic party, which nominated Strom Thurmond. Perkins helped organize the States’ Rights party convention and attempted to secure a role in the group for Smith, but Smith’s endorsement was too dangerous even for southern segregationists, and his assistance was rejected.19
A few months later, in September 1948, Perkins broke with Gerald Smith. That was not in itself unusual, since Smith had a way of inviting defections of formerly devoted associates, but in Perkins’s case, the break was dramatized by a rambling, vituperative book he published in 1949, The Biggest Hypocrite in America: Gerald L. K. Smith Unmasked. Perkins’s polemic against Smith makes curious reading. He made three specific attacks upon Smith. First, he argued that Smith’s goal was to become the dictator of America: “He eagerly awaits Revolution in America, thinking he is the strong man of the hour.” Since Smith could not even get a hearing from Perkins’s Dixiecrats, it is difficult to see how he could take over the country. Second, in Perkins’s view, Smith was, quite simply, insane, and lived in fear that his emotional problems would be revealed. Perkins’s final point is the strangest of all, for he asserted that the break with Smith was ultimately caused by the latter’s anti-Semitism. He rested his objections on British-Israel grounds, arguing that “Judah, from whence Jews Sprang, was one of the twelve tribes of Israel.” The Second Coming could not take place until all twelve tribes, including the Jewish descendants of Judah, had returned to Palestine. As Perkins saw it, Smith (and Wesley Swift, for that matter) “would put every Jew in America out of business if given authority,” and “Smith would kill or have every Jew killed that would not accept his leadership if he were in power.”20
Perkins’s indignation was ironic, because Smith’s anti-Semitism was well known before the break between them in 1948, indeed, was clear by the time Perkins first became a Smith associate. In addition, Perkins’s own views on Jews were far from unblemished. He had picked up and developed the same themes of racial contamination that had appeared in the Vancouver group and that cast increasing doubt on the role of the Jews in God’s plan. As Perkins wrote in The Modern Canaanites; or, The Enemies of Jesus Christ: “We have at least 13 Canaanite groups incorporated into the tribe of Judah, giving us a foreign race we know as the Jews. They have some Israel blood in their veins, and in that sense have a definite relation to the covenant that God made with Abraham but because of being largely of foreign to Israel blood are not worthy of being considered the true children of Judah.” One can only speculate on the fulsome philo-Semitism suddenly manifested in his book on Gerald L. K. Smith; perhaps his vindictiveness overrode his convictions.21
In any case, Smith responded in kind. Writing to Wesley Swift in the spring of 1949, Smith concluded that Perkins had done no political damage, but characterized him as “the vilest, most consciousless human being I have ever known.” Smith concluded that Perkins was “either … insane or possessed of a devil.”22
Smith’s relationship with Bertrand Comparet was altogether more harmonious. Indeed, Comparet appears to have stood relatively aloof from the factional strife that periodically erupted among Identity sectarians. Comparet was born in San Diego at the turn of the century. Educated at Stanford, he became a lawyer, first serving as a deputy district attorney in San Diego County, then as San Diego deputy city attorney. After 1947, he was in private practice, although he must have been hard-pressed to fit his professional activities into a career already filled with Identity preaching and the publication of his Identity pamphlet series, Your Heritage. Comparet died in 1983 at the age of eighty-two.23
Comparers extraprofessional activities were intimately interwoven with the affairs of Smith and Wesley Swift. He served as legal adviser to the California Anti-Communist League, which Swift headed and whose assistant director was Charles F. Robertson, a key Smith aide. He served in all manner of capacities for Smith—as an emissary on missions to Washington in the hope of interesting public officials in Smith’s views, as both a planner and a speaker at Christian Nationalist conventions, and as a contributor to The Cross and the Flag. In 1955, he successfully defended Smith in a libel suit.24
However much Comparet may have served Smith as a jack-of-all-trades, he was never as significant for either Smith or Christian Identity as his comrade Wesley Swift. For both religious and political reasons, Swift emerges as the single most significant figure in the early history of Identity. While he conducted his political activities for the most part through Smith’s organizations, his influence as a preacher gave him an independent base, so that Smith magnified Swift’s position without overwhelming it. This needs to be made clear, because so many published references to Swift repeat Ralph Lord Roy’s erroneous description of him as Gerald L. K. Smith’s “chauffeur, bodyguard, and research assistant.” More than anyone else, Wesley Swift was responsible for popularizing Christian Identity in right-wing circles by combining British-Israelism, a demonic anti-Semitism, and political extremism. Later Identity figures, such as Richard Girnt Butler and James K. Warner, sought to present themselves as his heir. Swift’s influence certainly did not flow from any gifts as a systematic thinker, and he left no extended statement of his religious views. But he was a compelling preacher, whose riveting style is evident from even the technically flawed recordings of his sermons. His widely reprinted articles are essentially sermon texts.25
Like many others on the Identity right, Swift moved through successively more conservative forms of evangelical Protestantism to his final theological stance. He was born in New Jersey in 1913, the son of a Methodist minister, Richard Swift. What social views he might have been imbued with as a child are unclear, but much later, in 1958, the older Swift wrote Gerald L. K. Smith thanking Smith for a picture of Joseph McCarthy and a copy of The International Jew. Of McCarthy, Richard Swift asserted “that the enemy achieved a great victory when they succeeded in silencing his attacks on the strongholds of Communism.” Concerning The International Jew, he wrote that “you [Smith] deserve the highest commendation for all you have done to put this very informative book in the hands of our American people, especially where it will do the most good.” Whether or not Wesley Swift heard comparable views in his youth, he quickly demonstrated an attraction to religion. He had a born-again experience at seventeen and received his license to preach in the Methodist church the following year. At about that time, he moved to Los Angeles, where he attended Bible college, and the Los Angeles area remained his base thereafter.26
Notwithstanding his strong Methodist connections, he left the church in his youth, a move his widow attributes to his distaste for the reformism of the Social Gospel. In California he maintained some ties with Aimee Semple McPher-son’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. In the mid-1950s, by which time Swift was in California, more than half the national membership of the Foursquare Gospel church was on the Pacific Coast. For the most part, however, Swift went his own way religiously, functioning first as an itinerant evangelist and later establishing his own independent church. His early preaching was in the Randsburg area, in the Mojave Desert, but he eventually moved to the Antelope Valley, at the edge of the desert, north of Los Angeles.27
Just as Swift’s break with Methodism is unclear, so controversy surrounds the question of how he first became acquainted with British-Israel/Identity doctrines. Swift’s widow thinks Swift may have first heard about British-Israelism listening to Gerald Burton Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose political activities made him a defendant in the widely publicized 1942 sedition trial of right-wing figures (William Dudley Pelley was a codefendant). Winrod was certainly in a position to transmit some version of Anglo-Israel doctrine through his fellow Kansan, Charles Fox Parham. Parham had drifted to the right politically, perhaps because of rejection by his black protégé, W. J. Seymour. Parham praised the Klan in the 1920s and, more significantly, wrote for one of Winrod’s periodicals.28
On the other hand, James K. Warner of the Christian Defense League and the New Christian Crusade church, who considers himself Swift’s spiritual heir, offered another theory, that in his late teens, Swift heard a lecture by “a Kingdom Identity minister,” not otherwise identified. Yet a third theory came from William Potter Gale, who was once close to Swift but became bitterly hostile after Swift’s death, so that Gale’s views must be weighed with care. Gale first presented his account in a 1975 printed attack on Swift, five years after the latter’s death, and then elaborated upon it in extended interviews with a California reporter, Cheri Seymour, a few months before Gale’s own death. In both accounts, he places Swift as a “preacher” in the Foursquare Gospel church, whose way into Identity was facilitated by San Jacinto Capt, who apparently had organized a pyramid study group in Temple City, California. (Capt’s son, E. Raymond, became a pyramid author whose works are sold widely by Identity organizations.) When Gale wrote about the relationship between Capt and Swift, he implied that Capt was the source of Swift’s Identity beliefs. In the conversations with Seymour, he suggested that Capt’s major function was to provide Swift with an audience receptive to the Identity message. In any case, Gale clearly places these contacts in the World War II years, a full decade after Warner’s dating. Far more plausible than any of these theories is that Swift acquired his British-Israelism when he attended the Kingdom Bible College in Los Angeles. Kingdom, where he later set up a comparative theology program, had been established in 1930 and was associated with a local British-Israel group, the Covenant Evangelistic Association. Both the college and the association were, in turn, closely linked to Philip E. J. Monson. Monson, who published through the association, had been Howard Rand’s man in the West. By 1930, he was in charge of all of the activities of the Anglo-Saxon Federation on the Pacific Coast. Swift came to California shortly after the college was founded, and his association with it very likely was the principal source of his early Anglo-Israel views. While these conflicts cannot be definitively resolved, they point to some salient characteristics of the religious milieu in which Swift moved—that in the southern California of the 1930s and 1940s, Anglo-Israelism impinged from many different sources, including Pentecostal revivalism and the activities of Rand’s Anglo-Saxon Federation. British-Israelism was “in the air,” accessible to anyone engaged in quests for religious fulfillment through evangelical Protestantism or political activity on the extreme right. As we shall see, Wesley Swift was seeking both.29
Swift founded his own church in Lancaster, California, in the mid-1940s. A report by the California state attorney general placed the founding of the church in 1946, but the 1958 celebration of the tenth anniversary of Swift’s Los Angeles ministry suggests that the church was not organized until two years later. In any case, its original name was the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation, in keeping with the currency given “Anglo-Saxon” in American proto-Identity circles by Howard Rand and his followers. The subsequent name—the Church of Jesus Christ Christian—might have appeared innocuous to the outsider but expressed the Identity belief that Jesus was not a Jew. During the same period in which Swift was founding his church, immediately after the end of World War II, he also attended the Anglo-Israel/Identity meetings organized by John Lovell. These were the final round of U.S.Canadian conferences begun in the Pacific Northwest in 1937.30
Swift was eager to spread his message beyond the Antelope Valley. As we have already seen, he gave well-publicized Bible lectures in Los Angeles under Gerald L. K. Smith’s sponsorship on such topics as “Khrushchev’s Invasion of America in the Light of Bible Prophecy” (this was at the time of Khrushchev’s tour of the United States). When his work for Smith required him to travel to Oklahoma, he combined political activism with Identity meetings in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. While Smith received contributions given at the Christian Nationalist Crusade gatherings, the two agreed that Swift would keep any offerings collected at Identity meetings. In the 1950s, Swift formed a religious coalition with Bertrand Comparet under the umbrella title Anglo Saxon Christian Congregations Incorporated, for which Swift served as president and Comparet vice-president, which listed branches in Los Angeles, Lancaster, San Diego, and San Francisco.31
When the tenth anniversary of Swift’s ministry was celebrated in 1958, Gerald L. K. Smith organized the celebration. Smith sent out announcements to friends of the Christian Nationalist Crusade “because of my great personal affection for this brilliant Christian statesman [Swift].” Smith sent out personal invitations to such close Swift associates as Bertrand Comparet and John Lovell. Lovell, by then in Dallas, sent an effusive message to be read at the festivities, in which he described Swift as “one of the best informed persons, on public affairs to be found anywhere in America.” While he could not himself attend, he asked that “our Heavenly Father continue to guide, protect, bless, and use Dr. Swift and his great ministry.” Reverend George Rigler in Oklahoma wrote that Swift was “a Bulward [sic] against the Hordes of Antichrist,” while Reverend Bob Howard in Little Rock claimed that “no man in America has done more to shape my personal ministry than Dr. Wesley Swift.”32
While Swift was cutting a wide swath through Identity circles, extending his influence through California and beyond, he was simultaneously pursuing an active right-wing political career. His first brush with political notoriety occurred in 1946, when he was involved in an attempt to revive the Ku Klux Klan in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, like many other areas of the country, experienced explosive Klan growth in the 1920s, but the movement declined sharply in the 1930s, and by the end of the war was virtually nonexistent. In February and March 1946, crosses were burned in the mountain town of Big Bear Lake, northeast of Los Angeles. Although the perpetrators were never identified, Swift spoke about “the new Klan” to a Big Bear Lake American Legion post in late March. Swift and a former Kleagle, Ray J. Schneider, refused to cooperate in an investigation by the state attorney general, although Schneider did eventually testify. Gun-permit records revealed that Swift had purchased twelve handguns between 1932 and 1946, including four between the fall of 1945 and April 1946, as well as an undisclosed number of rifles. The attorney general began court proceedings to dissolve the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, whose state incorporation dated from the 1920s. In the course of these investigations, it was revealed that a deputy sheriff stationed in Lancaster, where Swift’s church was located, had a close relationship with Swift and might have been involved in his Klan activities. He was initially transferred, then discharged. Swift himself gained significant press coverage but suffered no penalties as a result of the episode.33
At about the same time, Swift met Gerald L. K. Smith. As Smith told it, his speaking engagement at a high school auditorium was picketed by a large and hostile crowd. While police were able to control the picketers and get Smith and his wife to the platform, Smith feared attack by members of the audience: “I turned to the right and there sat a young man about 30 years old [Swift was in fact about thirty-three at the time]. He turned to me and said: ‘Don’t be afraid, Mr. Smith. Anyone who comes toward you will be sorry.’ He lifted up his coat and there he held a black automatic pistol.” It was the beginning of an association that lasted more than two decades. Smith’s voluminous correspondence with Swift began in early 1946 and extended into the mid-1960s, by which time Smith had left California. Swift toured the West Coast with Smith and participated in a wide range of activities of Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade. On Smith’s behalf, Swift attended a conference of conservative Republicans in Chicago and took on a nebulous mission to Washington “for the purpose of initiating activity in relationship to certain fundamental projects being undertaken by the Christian Nationalist Crusade.” In much the same manner as Smith’s own writing, Swift’s report of the mission insinuates but does not document associations with highly visible conservative politicians, including Senators William Jenner, John Bricker, Joseph McCarthy, and William Knowland. Swift outlined a series of essential projects that required completion as “the exclusive property of most patriotic citizens.” They generally involved securing information—“the lowdown”—on various nefarious activities, all somehow linked to evil conspiracies. Thus Swift darkly hinted that “some place, somehow men of great power are covering up awful things. Why has the President [Eisenhower] forbidden employees of certain Government bureaus to report treason to members of Senate committees? … Why has this terrible Jew, Matusow, been used as a witness to belittle Senatorial committees? .. . We must know the answers to these questions.” Swift’s report was sent to Christian Nationalist supporters and duly published in The Cross and the Flag. At the same time, Swift was also speaking to Christian Nationalist Crusade conventions and helping to plan the Crusade’s “Emergency Congress.”34
The Christian Nationalist Crusade was not the only vehicle for Swift’s political activities or his involvements with Gerald Smith. The California Anti-Communist League, which Swift headed, shared a secretary with his church and had as its assistant director Smith’s close associate, Charles Robertson, who became Smith’s assistant in 1953 and took over direction of what remained of Smith’s activities after the latter died.35
Swift’s relationship with Gerald Smith weakened, however, by 1962. Smith wrote a strange letter to Swift in which he accused the preacher of slighting him by failing to invite Smith to address Identity meetings, to invite Smith to Swift’s home, or to dine out with Smith. Smith speculated “that you [Swift] have obligations which I do not know about to people who are not cordial in their attitude toward me…. This may seem like a childish viewpoint, but regardless of any other theories which you may have concerning my restrained attitude, this letter contains the complete and exact truth.” While Swift’s response does not survive, the two remained in brief but only occasional communication for the remaining few years. In 1964, Smith established a summer home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to which he eventually moved. The final letter to Smith in 1965 came, significantly, from Swift’s secretary, because.“[Mrs. Swift] and Dr. Swift are busy almost 24 hours a day.”36
Wesley Swift’s political activities survived the weakening of his ties to Gerald L. K. Smith. Indeed, he came to the attention of the California state attorney general again in 1965, this time as part of a report on right-wing paramilitary groups. The report linked Swift to two such organizations, the California Rangers and the Christian Defense League (CDL). A raid on the home of a league member had turned up eight machine guns and an assortment of other weapons. A Ranger was “arrested for selling a machine gun and Sten gun to undercover agents.” Swift’s association with both groups, and particularly the CDL, was intimately related to the activities of his protégé, William Potter Gale, who in time himself became a major Identity figure, part of the Comparet-Swift-Gale triumvirate that defined Christian Identity in California.37
William Potter Gale came to his religious and political vocation after a military career. By his own account, he was the youngest lieutenant colonel in the army when he was promoted at the age of twenty-seven. He served on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff during World War II and helped organize guerrilla forces in the Philippines. War injuries required his retirement in 1950, when he was thirty-three. Gale was characteristically inconsistent in describing how he first became acquainted with Identity doctrine. He wrote that he had received his initial training in Identity from S. J. Capt, who, along with Steven Goodyear (an Identity believer with links to Gerald L. K. Smith), took Gale to meet Wesley Swift in 1956. In the same year, Swift ordained Gale as an Identity minister. In Gale’s 1987 conversations with Cheri Seymour, ten months before he died, Gale not only elaborated on this story but inserted a slightly different one as well. In this version, he met S. J. Capt at a meeting of conservative Republicans at Gale’s home in 1953, when he was just entering right-wing politics. Capt introduced him to Identity and then arranged a “study program” for Gale involving himself and an otherwise unidentified Catholic priest, “Father Eustace.” At the same time, according to Gale, he decided to study for the Episcopal ministry, and claimed to have been ordained in 1956 (perhaps not coincidentally the same year Swift ordained him).38
However, in the Seymour conversations, he raised yet another possibility. He recalled that he had first heard about Identity in 1946, when the army sent him for a period of study at Yale. In New Haven, he claimed to have discovered the writings of “Professor Charles Totten from Yale University.” Given Totten’s extremely tenuous association with Yale (described in chapter 2), it is most unlikely that simply being at Yale brought Totten to Gale’s attention, although he may fortuitously have run across the Our Race volumes. Gale also recalled that a Yale Russian history professor, whose name he does not provide, told him that the Russian czars were descended from the tribes of Israel, and that that first planted the Identity seed. But whatever ideas Gale may have come upon in New Haven, he almost certainly had no sustained contact with Anglo-Israelism or Identity before he retired to California in 1950.39
As with so much else in the history of Christian Identity, accounts of the founding of the Christian Defense League are also ambiguous and contradictory. In Gale’s account, the CDL was founded by him and S. J. Capt at some point between 1957 and 1962 (Gale tended to be vague about dates). He claimed to have then brought in Swift and Comparet. Comparet, as a lawyer, incorporated the organization. In an alternative account, an anonymous follower of Swift’s claimed that the CDL had been “actuated” in 1963 with little or no help from Gale. A CDL brochure gives the date as 1964. During this period Gale and Swift were apparently still on good terms, for in 1959, Gerald L. K. Smith had written Swift mentioning how pleased he was that Swift had reported on Gale’s staunch loyalty to the Christian Nationalist Crusade.40
Regardless of whether the CDL was founded in either the late 1950s or (as is more likely) in the early 1960s, and regardless of the roles Gale and Swift may have taken, the organization does not initially appear to have been very active. Indeed, both Gale and Swift supporters agree that the organization had to be “reactivated” a short time later. Its alleged paramilitary activities appear to date from this second phase. A journalist, William W. Turner, links the CDL and its members with a variety of illegal schemes ranging from the theft of dynamite to a plot to assassinate Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Turner also claims that in June 1964 Swift and associates met with American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell to attempt an organizational merger. None of these stories can be independently confirmed.41
The public face of the Christian Defense League was plain enough.
(a) Its specific and primary purpose is to encourage Christians to join together and cooperate for the promotion of their mutual interests as Christians and the propagation of their religion; to oppose all persecution which may be directed against Christians by reason of their religion and all attacks directed against Christianity; and by all lawful means to defend Christian individuals and institutions against persecution or any attacks made against them by reason of their religion.
(b) To promote the knowledge of and belief in the doctrines and tenets of Christianity and the high standards of morality and ethics advocated therein.
Notwithstanding the broad language, the CDL was an Identity vehicle. Its first president and national director was Richard Girnt Butler, an engineer at Lockheed who had come within Swift’s orbit.42
Richard Butler reached Swift by a circuitous route. He was first introduced to William Potter Gale by one of Gale’s parishioners. Whether or not Gale gave Butler the Identity message, as Gale later claimed, there seems little dispute that Gale brought Butler to Wesley Swift’s church. The effect on Butler was electrifying: “He [Swift] was the total turning point in my life. The light turned on. He had the answers I was trying to find.” Butler became a member of Swift’s church and then ascended to the leadership of the CDL. As we shall soon see, Butler’s Identity career was just beginning.43
Butler left California in 1973. The leadership of the Christian Defense League then passed to another Swift disciple, James K. Warner. Warner, a Pennsylvanian, had moved first to Alexandria, Virginia, and then, in 1966, to Los Angeles. He carried with him a variety of political and religious baggage, including affiliations with the National Socialist White People’s party and Odinism, the putative religion of pre-Christian Nordics. Although he initially moved in neo-Nazi circles in Los Angeles, he too converted to Identity. His New Christian Crusade Church in Los Angeles offered Identity as Swift had preached it. As Warner later proclaimed on the CDL’s behalf: “As a White person YOU ARE A DESCENDANT OF THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL or Judah and as such are THE CHOSEN PEOPLE OF GOD.”44
111 with kidney disease and diabetes, Swift died in the waiting room of a Mexican clinic of an apparent heart attack on October 8, 1970. He was fifty-seven. The funeral was held on October 12, and a memorial service on October 18. The void left by Swift’s death was not readily filled, not only because others lacked his zeal as a preacher but because there were so many potential successors in a movement that had no mechanism for establishing leadership, let alone succession.45
There was, of course, William Potter Gale, whose own ministry had been established before Swift’s death. Gale tried his hand at theology and in fact produced a codification of Identity belief far more systematic than anything Swift had written. After Swift’s death, however, he turned on his former patron. Gale had been provoked by an anonymous 1975 article in the Swift-oriented National Chronicle, an Identity paper published in northern California and edited by Hal W. Hunt. The article—“Who Is ‘Col.’ Gale?”—portrayed him as a shifty intriguer who used Swift but secretly betrayed him. Gale’s angry response in his own publication in turn portrayed Swift as a Johnny-come-lately to Identity and political activism, and painted his supporters as small-minded people unable to cope with Gale’s success. As his version of Identity “spread … across the land, they see its success and their ego simply cannot stand up to it.”46
Not content to direct his attack on Swift’s admirers, Gale made a series of allegations against Swift himself, albeit five years after the latter’s death. He claimed that Swift had smeared him by spreading the report that Gale was a CIA agent. Swift also attempted, according to Gale, to discredit Gale’s Ministry of Christ Church by portraying it as a financial rival, depriving Swift of offerings he might otherwise have received. By the time Gale was finished with his lengthy counterattack, he had burned any remaining bridges to Wesley Swift’s followers.47
Isolated from those he called “Swiftites,” Gale nonetheless continued to be politically active. Along with Henry “Mike” Beach, he was one of the founders of Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. The loosely organized Posse movement was based upon the belief that no entity above the county sheriff’s posse possesses constitutional validity. Gale, who fancied himself an expert on constitutional law, wrote that “a County (or Parish) government is the highest authority of government in our Republic.” This radical rejection of the state and federal governments Gale carried to its logical conclusion in his battles with the Internal Revenue Service described in chapter 10. Gale was convicted of tax-related criminal charges on October 2, 1987, and sentenced to prison the following January. However, he had been seriously ill with emphysema during the trial and died on April 28, 1988, at the age of seventy-one, while an appeal was pending.48
James K. Warner, the second national director of the Christian Defense League, eventually moved the league and the New Christian Crusade Church to Louisiana, where he continued to publish Wesley Swift’s sermons and writings. In time he drew close to another right-wing figure in Louisiana, David Duke, during Duke’s days as a Ku Klux Klan entrepreneur. That is a story best left for a later chapter.49
The best known of those who tried to follow in Swift’s footsteps was, of course, Richard Girnt Butler, who had led the reactivated CDL before Warner. According to Swift’s daughter, Joan Nielson, Butler conducted services at the Lancaster, California, church with no encouragement from the church board. Nielson claimed the result was a shrinking congregation made up of Butler’s friends. In 1973, Butler moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Shortly afterward, with the help of Nielson and her husband, Butler established his Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Although it bore the same name as Swift’s church, the remaining members and the board of the church in Lancaster refused to grant Butler a charter. Indeed, the Lancaster church continues to maintain an existence under Swift’s widow, primarily as an outlet for her husband’s tape-recorded sermons and publications. In any case the Nielsons eventually became disillusioned and left Butler’s church.50
Nonetheless, Butler’s enterprises were destined to become the most publicly visible Identity manifestations in America. In addition to the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, he organized a political arm, the well-known Aryan Nations, both housed in a heavily guarded compound. Annual Aryan Nations World Congresses on the grounds came as close to an umbrella organization as the racial movement has had, drawing both Identity and non-Identity racialists from North America and Europe and consolidating Butler’s position. Yet in so fractious a movement, leadership is a relative term. By the early 1990s, in his seventies and in uncertain health, Butler attempted to turn leadership over to his “chief of staff,” Carl Franklin, a generation younger. In little more than a year, however, Franklin left to form his own church in Montana. With Butler’s withdrawal, the possibility of leadership by a major Identity figure drawn from Swift’s own circle ended, for Gale was dead and Warner had never beemable to attract a significant following.51
The highly politicized and often violent Identity groups of the 1970s and 1980s emerged directly out of the movement that solidified in the decade 1936-46. During that period, British-Israelism was transformed from an extension of an English movement to a distinctly American movement, dimly aware of English antecedents but with no ties, organizational or personal, to the British-Israel World Federation. Stimulated by rising levels of anti-Semitism in the writings of the Vancouver group, Identity placed at least as much emphasis upon the diabolical nature of a Jewish adversary as on its sense of chosenness. Concentrated on the West Coast, under the impact of evangelical and Pentecostal groups in southern California, Identity became increasingly a religion of millenarian anti-Semitism. From the fog of names, associations, and rivalries, two points clearly emerge. First, a series of influences converged on southern California in the 1930s and 1940s, bringing British-Israelism in forms that were increasingly linked to anti-Semitism and the political right and ever farther removed from English roots. Second, these influences can be traced back through sequences of American, Canadian, and eventually English Anglo-Israelites to establish, as it were, Identity’s lines of descent.
The paths of influence were thus complex but also clear: one line ran from Hine in England to Totten in America, then to Frank Sandford, the Maine evangelist, and from him, through Charles Fox Parham, to the Pentecostal movement. A second line ran from Hine to Totten, then to Howard Rand, and through Rand’s Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, to widely scattered groups of American Anglo-Israelites, including Philip E. J. Monson, at whose Bible college Wesley Swift studied. A third line ran from Hine and the others in England across Canada to the group in Vancouver, which established linkages with the Anglo-Saxon Federation on the West Coast. All three streams converged in southern California, to which Pentecostalists had migrated, where the Anglo-Saxon Federation had vibrant branches, and to which the ideas of the Vancouver group had filtered down the coast.
It is important to reconstruct this in order to establish the channels that led from nineteenth-century British-Israelism to twentieth-century Christian Identity. But important as this reconstruction is, it is not enough, for Identity is doctrinally as well as organizationally distinct. It is not merely a matter of the diffusion of ideas but of their metamorphosis as well. At what points and in what ways did old doctrines change and new teachings develop? For this we must turn to the tangled tale of the religious ideas themselves since Identity’s millenarian anti-Semitism is not only a function of groups and individuals, writers and publications, but also a product of ideas. Thus far we have examined the conduits of communications, the means by which the ideas were transmitted. It is time now to examine the ideas.