William Luther Pierce

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Use American English Template:Infobox person William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was an American neo-Nazi political activist. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he authored the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The first novel inspired multiple terrorist attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce founded the white nationalist National Alliance, an organization which he led for almost 30 years.

Born in Atlanta, Pierce received a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University in 1955 as well as a doctorate from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1962. He became an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University in that year. In 1965, he left his tenure at Oregon State University and became a senior researcher for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. He moved to the Washington, D.C. area and became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was assassinated in 1967. Pierce became co-leader of the National Youth Alliance, which split in 1974, with Pierce founding the National Alliance.

Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries (1978) depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a world war and the extermination of non-white races. Another novel by Pierce, Hunter (1989) portrays the actions of a lone-wolf white supremacist assassin. In 1985, Pierce relocated the headquarters of the National Alliance to Hillsboro, West Virginia, where he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church. Pierce spent the rest of his life in West Virginia hosting a weekly show, American Dissident Voices, and overseeing his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), as well as books which were published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. and the white power music label Resistance Records.

Early life

William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11, 1933.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He was the eldest son of Marguerite Ferrell, a journalist, and William Luther Pierce II, an insurance salesman,Template:Sfn<ref name="Reed">Template:Cite news</ref> who married in 1929. His father had served in World War I. Through his mother, Pierce's great-grandfather was Thomas H. Watts, the governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederate States of America.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>Template:Sfn He had one younger brother, Sanders "Sandy" Pierce.Template:Sfn

His family moved to Norfolk, Virginia, with his father's insurance business when Pierce was four years old.Template:Sfn Pierce's upbringing was at times difficult.Template:Sfn Pierce's son, Kelvin, described Pierce as having been born to a mother who rarely showed affection and an alcoholic father who entirely ignored him; Marguerite would pay Pierce to find the alcohol that William Sr. stashed around the house.Template:Sfn Pierce's father was killed in a car accident involving a teenaged driver on January 30, 1943, when Pierce was nine years old.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn<ref name="Virg430131">Template:Cite news</ref>

Following his father's death, Pierce and his brother were supported by their mother, and moved throughout the Southern United States.Template:Sfn From the age of 10 on, Pierce worked odd jobs to help his family.Template:Sfn Pierce attended public schools throughout the South, attending junior high in Dallas, Texas, until the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn When his mother remarried, Pierce was sent to a military academy. His last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, where he did well academically. He worked at the school's chemistry stockrooms.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Pierce later said that as a teen he had been "sort of a nerdy kid without social skills", awkward around women and with few friends.Template:Sfn His teenage hobbies and interests were chemistry, electronics, and reading science fiction works, particularly the pulp magazine Planet Stories.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Education and physics career

Pierce earned a full scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston in 1951.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a time in mid-1955, then did his graduate studies at California Institute of Technology starting later that year.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn At the University of Colorado Boulder, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962.Template:Sfn<ref name="Reed" /> His doctorate thesis was entitled "Electrically Induced Nuclear Quadrupole Spin Transitions In A GaAs Single Crystal"<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>Template:Sfn and he studied under the physicist W. H. Tantila.<ref name="Oreg660624">Template:Cite news</ref> In 1957, Pierce married Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn<ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref>

After getting his doctorate, Pierce taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The only organization he belonged to at this time was the American Physical Society.<ref name="Oreg660624" /> A contemporary article from The Oregonian said of his time teaching at OSU that there was "much respect for Pierce, but not much love", particularly among his students. He was regarded as a very hard worker who never took breaks.<ref name="Oreg660624" /> His assistant reported that he was unpopular owing to a difficulty with getting along with him.<ref name="Oreg660624" /> Pierce's tenure as assistant professor at Oregon State University coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement and later the counterculture.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

At this time, Pierce was a registered Republican, though he did not consider himself a member of the party and voted independently.<ref name="Hughes1966b">Template:Cite news</ref> At this time he considered himself largely uninterested in politics.Template:Sfn During his education, Pierce paid little attention to the wider world; he claimed that he had initially been sympathetic to the idea of Black civil rights, but was suspicious of integration as damaging freedom of association.Template:Sfn He was inflamed by what he viewed as a media bias against segregationists; when some of his colleagues blamed this on Jews, he became more interested in racial matters, and became increasingly militant in his thoughts on race.Template:Sfn He blamed Jews for the civil rights movement, along with the protests against the Vietnam War.<ref name="Sutherland">Template:Cite news</ref> According to his son Kelvin, after Pierce became interested in racial matters he ceased to pay much attention to his children, outside of beating them.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite news</ref> Pierce regularly physically abused his children.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />

Beginning in 1962, he was a member of the anti-communist John Birch Society, and this at the time appealed to him.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He did not agree with the widely held Bircher belief that all social movements they disliked were communist plots, and their refusal to discuss racial topics; he later wrote of the John Birch Society experience that "I quickly found out that the two topics on which I wanted an intelligent discussion—race and Jews—were precisely the two topics Birch Society members were forbidden to discuss".Template:Sfn He resigned the next year, viewing the Birchers as "too passive" on racial topics. He saw the anti-communism as a distraction from the true issue, race, and expressed his disappointment that they were opposed to the civil rights movement, but "weren't willing to deal with it on a racial basis".Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In a 1966 interview he described his interest in Nazism increasing when he heard of interracial marriages among his coworkers at OSU, which disgusted him.<ref name="Hughes1966b" /> His later decision to leave his job for unpaid work writing neo-Nazi literature baffled his OSU coworker David B. Nicodemus, though some of his students and an assistant were not surprised, saying he was fixated on Adolf Hitler and had read Mein Kampf in its original German.<ref name="Oreg660624" />

Pierce left his job as a professor in June 1965 to become a senior researcher for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. In his field he was generally successful.<ref name="Oreg660624" /><ref name="Gettleman">Template:Cite news</ref>Template:Sfn He worked as a senior research associate physicist at Pratt, earning a $15,400 a year salary. He received government security clearance for this job but never actually worked on classified projects.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He directed a United States Air Force grant of $35,000 on semiconductors.<ref name="Oreg660624" /> There, he spent his time undertaking his own study of political and historical topics, which radicalized him further, reading alarmist books about race at the Yale University Library.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He was not openly racist with his coworkers; when the ANP was investigated, his coworkers described him as a "first-class physicist", but also "impenetrable", and said they had an "intense dislike of him as a person".Template:Sfn He was known as a loner and for the lack of instruction he gave subordinate researchers.Template:Sfn

White supremacy

American Nazi Party

In 1963, Pierce saw on television a clip of protests against George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party (ANP); intrigued by Rockwell, he struck up a correspondence with him.Template:Sfn Pierce found Rockwell personally impressive, and the party's ideology appealed to him, but he disliked their explicit Nazi imagery.Template:Sfn According to Rockwell, Pierce mailed him complaining Rockwell had some things right but was thinking too small, to which Rockwell said Pierce should do something himself.<ref name="Oreg660624" /> When he moved to work with Pratt & Whitney, he began visiting Rockwell at his headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He and Rockwell became increasingly close.Template:Sfn After only a few months of work, his performance worsened and he attempted unsuccessfully to drive a car through a picket line of protestors during a wildcat strike at the plant he worked at.Template:Sfn He took a vacation from Pratt & Whitney in May 1966, returning to resign abruptly after less than a year of employment, claiming he had been writing hours a day for months and wished to be a writer.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Afterwards, Pierce moved his family to Virginia. His wife became a university math teacher, and initially supporting Pierce in his aims. However, she did not agree with his political views.Template:Sfn Pierce started a gun sales business, which sold machine guns. Due to the Gun Control Act of 1968, the business closed.Template:Sfn He was the best educated associate of Rockwell, as well as the party's most enthusiastic promoter of violent action, believing that a National Socialist revolution required violence. Despite this he did not participate in the group's street actions.Template:Sfn Pierce advocated Nordic superiority within the movement and said the leaders of the group should only come from "pure Germanic stock".Template:Sfn He disliked and insulted ANP member John Patler on account of his ethnically Greek background, as did high ranking ANP member Matt Koehl. When, as a result of Patler's influence, Rockwell argued for a broader definition of the white race (including Slavs and Mediterraneans as white), Pierce and Koehl abhorred the idea and resisted, resulting in a schism in the partly leadership, though Rockwell eventually prevailed.Template:Sfn

Pierce's activities within the ANP were mostly centered around writing and publication of ANP materials.Template:Sfn In 1966, Pierce became the editor of the World Union of National Socialists quarterly ideological journal, National Socialist World, for which he split the production costs with Rockwell.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The publication was stylized like an academic quarterly and aimed at an academic racist audience.<ref name="Oreg660624" /> He was a close advisor to Rockwell and functioned as the ANP's "house intellectual".Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Pierce, interested in "racial esotericism", was largely responsible for the popularization of the works of Savitri Devi among the neo-Nazi and white nationalist movement.Template:Sfn Pierce advised Rockwell on power and media tactics, largely responsible for Rockwell's publicity success with the 1966 Chicago "White Power" marches.Template:Sfn Rockwell proposed a business partnership with Pierce, an "Extremist Speakers Bureau", offering a 20% commission on bookings for Pierce, who would be responsible for finding speakers. This never materialized.Template:Sfn Pierce and Rockwell were largely in agreement; they shared a similar worldview and goals, but they also sometimes had disputes.Template:Sfn

National Socialist White People's Party

Pierce did not actually join the ANP until it was renamed the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP) in January 1967.Template:Sfn Rockwell was murdered by Patler later that year.Template:Sfn There was some speculation, though it was never proven, that Pierce had something to do with it. However, Patler was ultimately convicted.Template:Sfn Some ANP members argued there was a conspiracy and Koehl, Pierce, and a man named Robert Allison Lloyd had orchestrated Rockwell's murder.Template:Sfn The day before the murder, Rockwell got into an argument with the three of them. One eyewitness claimed that he locked them out of their offices and said he would expel them. Rockwell's secretary and mistress Barbara von Goetz became convinced that the three of them had ordered Rockwell's killing and framed Patler to seize control of the party; Francis Joseph Smith, Rockwell's personal bodyguard, investigated on his own and concluded that the three of them had orchestrated Rockwell's murder.Template:Sfn Afterwards Pierce stayed in the NSWPP, under the leadership of Koehl, becoming one of its primary leaders.Template:Sfn

Pierce was at the time the chief voice for violent action in the party.Template:Sfn Pierce attempted to organize university students to the cause and promoted a philosophy of "total revolution", bringing young militant neo-Nazis into the party.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The other key member of this faction was James Mason, later the author of Siege, whom Pierce helped recruit into the party as a teenager.Template:Sfn In 1968, he suggested to Mason, a teenage member of the party, that he move to the party's headquarters in lieu of murdering his school administration. Mason credited Pierce's intervention with saving both his life and other lives.Template:Sfn Pierce became a prominent influence on Mason's life.Template:Sfn Another was a teenage adherent, Joseph Tommasi.Template:Sfn Pierce held Tommasi in high esteem for his militancy.Template:Sfn In March 1969, a NSWPP phone line operated by Tommasi that played a prerecorded message by Pierce which advocated murdering Black people was shut down. Another Pierce message advocated murdering U.S. senators.Template:Sfn That same year, born of their ideological commonality, Pierce and Tommasi launched the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) as a youth wing of the NSWPP, aiming for it to appeal to white college students.Template:Sfn He was sometimes invited to speak on university campuses. In one incident in 1970, he declared to an audience of University of Scranton students that Richard Nixon should be "dragged out of his office and shot"; Pierce was then investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who already had an interest in him prior.Template:Sfn

Pierce affiliated with several different movements and became prominent as an organizer and leader of the white nationalist movement. Pierce felt the NSWPP's continual display of explicit Nazi regalia hurt their recruitment, and wanted a more American variety of white supremacy. He fell out with the rest of Rockwell's successors. The "total revolution" philosophy annoyed Koehl.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He, Koehl, and Lloyd led the party into the 1970s.Template:Sfn However, he did not think Koehl was a proper leader, so he asked for Koehl to formally share power with the other two of them. This evolved into a power struggle when Koehl, offended, retaliated; Pierce lost, and ultimately left in July 1970.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He wrote a letter criticizing Koehl in the aftermath, declaring he would not be surprised if the party devolved into being "a sort of Matt Koehl Nazi Fan Club".Template:Sfn

National Alliance and novels

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After leaving the NSWPP, Pierce became an advisor to Willis Carto's National Youth Alliance.Template:Sfn He created Youth for Wallace, an organization supporting the bid for the presidency of George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama. Alongside Willis Carto, Youth for Wallace became the recruiting organization for the National Youth Alliance. The group was plagued by large amounts of infighting. Carto and Pierce had a falling out and the group split, leaving Pierce in control of the majority.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

In 1974, the National Youth Alliance was restructured and renamed as the National Alliance.Template:Sfn Pierce intended the organization to be a political vanguard that would ultimately bring about a white nationalist overthrow of the United States Federal Government.<ref name="Sutherland" /> The National Alliance was the most significant neo-Nazi group to come out of the NSWPP, and also the largest.Template:Sfn Pierce spent the rest of his life living in West Virginia.<ref name="Sutherland" />

In 1978, Pierce published The Turner Diaries under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, which became one of the most popular works of racist literature and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn It had started as a serial in the NA periodical Attack! in 1975.Template:Sfn The book is a graphically violent depiction of a future race war in the United States, which includes a detailed description of the "Day of the Rope" mass hangings of many "race traitors", followed by the systematic ethnic cleansing of the city, and eventually the entire world. The story is told through the perspective of Earl Turner, an active member of the white revolutionary underground resistance, called The Organization, led by the secret inner circle known as The Order. The Turner Diaries inspired a group of white revolutionary nationalists in the early 1980s called The Order, after The Order in the novel. The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting, bank robbery, and murder.Template:Sfn

Pierce divorced his wife Patricia Jones in 1982. His rationale for the split was that it was "necessary in order for me to have the peace of mind I need to do most effectively what I must do with my life".Template:Sfn<ref name=":0" /> He had very little contact with either of his children from then on, despite his son's repeated attempts to contact him.<ref name=":0" /> In 1983, Pierce married Elizabeth Prostel, which lasted until 1985.Template:Sfn He also had ties to British National Party leader John Tyndall.<ref name="Reed" />

In 1989, Pierce published another novel, Hunter, which tells the story of a man named Oscar Yeager, a veteran of the Vietnam War who begins by killing multiple interracial couples. He then assassinates liberal journalists, politicians and bureaucrats in the D.C. area. In interviews, Pierce called Hunter more realistic, and described his rationale for writing it as taking the reader through "an educational process".Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

In 1990, West Virginia Public Broadcasting made a documentary about Pierce, entitled Dr. No?Template:Sfn<ref name="O'Driscoll2003">Template:Cite news</ref> It was directed by Jacob Young. The title is a reference to how Pierce imagined his detractors portraying him.<ref name="O'Driscoll2003" />

He hosted a weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices, from 1991.<ref name="Sutherland" /> The NA also distributed the National Vanguard periodical and maintained a website.Template:Sfn Pierce rarely talked to the media, believing them to be dominated by Jews.<ref name="Reed" /> While in West Virginia, the National Alliance was monitored by authorities, but mostly left to their own devices. The FBI investigated Pierce, with their file on him growing to hundreds of pages long. Unlike many white supremacist leaders of the period, Pierce was never convicted of any crime.<ref name="Gettleman" />Template:Sfn

Pierce and The Turner Diaries gained attention following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who was inspired by the book.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn McVeigh used a very similar method to the book's main character, who is placed in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters with a fertilizer truck bomb.Template:Sfn When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found with him, with several phrases highlighted.Template:Sfn Pierce's stated opinion on the bombing varied; at one time Pierce denounced the bombing as it had not been at the right time. At other times, he said he did approve of the bombing.Template:Sfn In 2000, Pierce was profiled in a biography entitled The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds by academic Robert S. Griffin.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Death

In early 2002 Pierce was diagnosed with cancer.Template:Sfn Pierce died of kidney failure at his Hillsboro, West Virginia, compound on July 23, 2002.Template:Sfn<ref name="Gettleman" /> Shortly before his death, Pierce selected Erich Gliebe as his successor; Gliebe was the manager of Resistance Records.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Pierce's final public speech came on April 20, 2002 (Hitler's birthday). In this speech he criticized the rest of the White Power movement and other neo-Nazi groups, and promoted the cause of the National Alliance; this speech was divisive among white supremacists. This, in combination with in-group disputes and poor leadership, led to the National Alliance becoming far less significant after Pierce's death than it was under his leadership.Template:Sfn In 2020, his son Kelvin coauthored Sins of My Father, which chronicled his experiences with his father, and his rejection of his views.<ref name=":0" />

Views

Template:Neo-Nazism sidebar Pierce's views were centered around race, which he defined physically, culturally and spiritually; he believed that whites were the evolutionary peak of the human species and that they were being plotted against by Jews.Template:Sfn He viewed other racial groups as not always inevitable enemies, with the exception of Jews, who he believed would inevitably conflict with white people.Template:Sfn Pierce was frequently described as a neo-Nazi,<ref name="Reed" /><ref name="Johnston">Template:Cite news</ref> although he personally rejected this label.<ref name="60-Minutes">Template:Cite episode</ref> When confronted with the issue by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Pierce described the term as a slander, saying that though he "admire[d] many things that Hitler wrote", the National Alliance had "formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today".<ref name="60-Minutes" />

Pierce was opposed to individualism and largely viewed politics as a manifestation of group dynamics, criticizing modern American society as atomized and selfish. He accused individualists such as Ayn Rand, who was ethnically Jewish, of plotting against whites by promoting individualism to them.Template:Sfn Pierce's goal was to convince the white population through propaganda, leading ultimately to a violent race revolution; he promoted his views through several mediums.Template:Sfn Particularly important to his political views was World War II, perceived by Pierce as the most important event in modern Western history. He saw it as the triumph of democracy over fascism, which he believed to be the detriment of future generations, and led to the 1960s counterculture. He believed the counterculture was a kulturkampf designed to destroy Western civilization.Template:Sfn

Pierce was publicly critical of most contemporary right-wing terrorism, particularly lone wolf terrorism, though not for moral reasons. He agreed ideologically with the perpetrators of most right-wing lone wolf terrorism of the period, but thought it was ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. He accepted that "civilians are going to be killed", but said the current time was incorrect for it and it lacked "a plan that can be reasonably argued will get you what you want to achieve".Template:Sfn Despite these statements, Pierce dedicated his second book, Hunter, to lone wolf terrorist Joseph Paul Franklin, and became associated with the strategy of leaderless resistance; he also had several followers who committed acts of lone-wolf terrorism.Template:Sfn His approach to terrorism was, according to scholar George Michael, "a gradual approach to terrorism with a preparatory stage which emphasized propaganda and organization".Template:Sfn

Among Pierce's claimed inspirations for the development of his views were Dietrich Eckart's Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, August Kubizek's The Young Hitler I Knew, and Savitri Devi's The Lightning and the Sun. From Nietzsche he was particularly taken by the idea of being a master of one's own life and the points of power of the will. In Eckart's essay he found an ideological backing for his antisemitism, while he incorporated Devi's racist mysticism from Lightning and the Sun into his ideology.Template:Sfn Also influential on the development of his political thought were the works of American white supremacists Francis Parker Yockey, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant.Template:Sfn He was also influenced by white nationalist writer William Gayley Simpson; Pierce published Simpson's book, Which Way Western Man? in 1978.Template:Sfn According to his son Kelvin, he had asked Pierce why he had chosen white supremacy over all else, to which Pierce responded that it "was the only responsible thing I could do".<ref name=":0" />

In the 1970s, Pierce created a religious philosophy he called cosmotheism. Cosmotheism synergized mystical and scientific ideas. It combined Darwinian ideas with ancient Germanic legends.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The faith was atheistic and did not believe in a particular god.<ref name="Reed" /> It emphasizes evolutionary development, and portrays the future as a linear evolutionary path related to race.Template:Sfn In 2001, Pierce officiated the Cosmotheist wedding ceremony of Billy Roper, then a top staffer at the National Alliance.Template:Sfn Cosmotheism was highly esoteric in its beliefs, which led to it having little influence on neo-Nazis outside of the National Alliance.Template:Sfn It was influenced somewhat by Savitri Devi's thought.Template:Sfn

Bibliography

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Template:Cite book A collection of essays. Published posthumously after several years of delays by Pierce's successors.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

References

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Works cited

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William Luther Pierce

Contents

Early life

Education and physics career