Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party |
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| Title: | Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party |
| Author: | William H. Schmaltz |
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Type: | Book / Paperback |
| Publication Date: | August, 2000 |
| ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1574882627 / 9781574882629 |
| List Price: | $17.99 |
| You Save: | $16.49 |
| Amazon Price: | $1.50 (via Amazon marketplace seller) |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
This book is actually pretty hellish. Being a biography of George Lincoln Rockwell, Commander of The American Nazi Party. It tells of his life and death and all the battles in between. I have read the book, and it is often suprisingly humorous, and pleasantly impartial, which I was not expecting either. The tale of the American Nazi Party is something that could be made into a movie, were it not for the uniquely "sinister" treatment by the media of what a Nazi is. The author obviously went to extraordinary lengths to compile all the book's information, including many rare and amazing photographs, some of which makes Rockwell and his men appear particularly clever and brave, but often times rather ridiculous. One thing is certain, that they were indeed "the real thing"!
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Customer Reviews:
• Intriguing
15 December, 2005
Since his assassination in 1967, George Lincoln Rockwell has become a rather obscure footnote in American history. However, over the course of the last decade of his life, Rockwell was -- for many -- the living epitome of modern evil and his influence as a political extremist, racist, and agitator has continued long after his own death. As the founder of the American Nazi Party, Rockwell came to represent, for many, the dark side of America in the 1960s. William H. Schmaltz's intriguing, if not quite definitive, biography attempts to reveal just how and why Rockwell came into existence but also why his story remains important to this day.
Arguably, it's probably impossible to truly understand a character like Rockwell who, as Schmaltz shows, appears to only be comfortable when playing a role (in this case, that of a Nazi). We're given clues to understanding what fueled Rockwell's brand of agitation. We learn that his father was a veteran of vaudeville (and much of Rockwell's agitation was more meant to be theatrical than actual political activism) and that Rockwell, even before achieving his dubious fame, always seemed to feel the need to be the center of attention. They're intriguing clues and Schmaltz certainly offers a convincing portrait of an unstable man who was eventually imprisoned by his own impulsively concieved image but one still finishes the book unsure as to just what was truly behind Rockwell's seemingly unending hatred. As well, Rockwell's own death -- at the hands of a former American Nazi named John Patler -- is handled almost as an after thought. Beyond providing evidence that Patler was obviously unstable, Schmaltz doesn't provide much detail or speculation as to what ultimately led to Rockwell's murder.
Indeed, the book mostly becomes a year-by-year accounting of the activities of American Nazi Party and it is here that the book excels. While the '60s are lionized as a time of nonstop political activism, it is sometimes forgotten that not all of that activism was being done on the side of the Angels. Much of the political activism of the '60s was fueled not be idealism but by anger, not by love but by hatred. The final impression of George Lincoln Rockwell that one gets from Schmaltz's book is that of a racist, Swastika-sporting Abbie Hoffman. Beyond ideology, there seems to be little difference between the gun-toting, conflicted men who made up Rockwell's American Nazi Party and the Weathermen who plotted to blow up buildings in the name of peace. This is where Schmaltz's book provides it's strongest service -- he convincingly shows how a small group of extremists can, in times of chaos and with a charismatic leader, go from being a bunch of alienated losers to a true danger. It's an important lesson, made all the more powerful and pretinent by Schmaltz's refusal to either demonize or sanitize Rockwell and his followers.
Hate is an important, compelling look at one of the most important fringe figures in American history. Even if, by the book's end, the reader is truly no closer to understanding what created George Lincoln Rockwell then before, Schmaltz still shows why it's important to remember the man's life, no matter how distasteful it may have ultimately been.
- Amazon Customer Review
• The Real Enemy
23 October, 2009
Yes George Lincoln Rockwell HATED seeing what was happening to his country, HATED those who were behind America's degredation, and HATED the fact that nobody else seemed to notice or care. And for the LOVE of his country, he took daring action which sadly cost him his life. He was a decorated veteran, a brilliant writer and speaker and a man who deserves recognition and praise.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Great Book!
09 September, 2005
After all these years George Lincoln Rockwell still remains one of the most interesting figures to appear on the white nationalist scene. Son of a famous in his day vaudeville performer, went to an ivy league school, flew missions in ww2 and Korea, married to the daughter of the Icelandic ambassador to the United States, a talented artist and cartoonist, the list goes on and on. Rockwell really is someone who could have been a success at almost anything he chose to in life and is not the typical maladjusted freak that often gravitates toward white nationalism in its various forms.
Schmaltz has written a very fair and unbiased account of Rockwell and his "stormtroopers", who were a menage of brawlers, ex-cons and misfits along with some genuinly talented individuals. Rockwell in many ways was like a great pro wrestling heel with his agitation techniques, he inflamed crowds beyond the boiling point to out and out brawling riots many a time, but he also often won over initially hostile crowds using his sense of humor, (Rockwell was a VERY funny guy!) He was also the first public figure in the white nationalist scene to reject and ridicule the right wing, he was the first to draw alliances with black radicals (he had meetings with Malcolm X and was a guest speaker at NOI rallies a few times) so he was and actually still is a man years ahead of his time in many ways. The life of Rockwell is covered in this book from childhood to his assassination at the hands of one of his most dedicated followers in a very fair, unbiased, and fascinating account of the life and times of GLR.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Outstanding Biography
10 June, 2007
HATE ... is an excellent account of the life and times of one of the most controversial and confrontational men in American history and to my knowledge one of only three G. L. ROCKWELL biographies.
The book chronicles ROCKWELL's life from his childhood days as son of a vaudeville performer couple to his violent death at the hand of disgruntled ANP party officer John PATLER in August 1967. It is quite obvious that his family background in show business and his training in painting and advertisement helped him in his political activism.
Although little known today and attracting only a handful of followers at the time (ANP membership never exceeded 200), George Lincoln ROCKWELL's influence can hardly be overestimated.
His book WHITE POWER is still read today and popular among white supremacists. In fact it was ROCKWELL (in a CBS discussion with Stokley CARMICHAEL in July 1966) who coined the phrase "White Power". The by now commonplace neo-Nazi international networking dates back to the creation of the World Union of National Socialists in 1962 by ROCKWELL and British right-wing extremists (a hugely interesting chapter, by the way. The author details how ROCKWELL entered Great Britain rather clandestinely for a secret meeting in Cotswold Hills with Colin JORDAN and his deputy John TYNDALL to found the WUNS; TYNDALL would in later years head the British National Party. Their efforts to evade police and journalists are like out of a spy novel!) Also noteworthy is ROCKWELL's use of music to spread his message; some of his stormtroopers (singing as "Otis and his three bigots") recorded two singles with racist country songs.
Mr. SCHMALTZ also repeatedly points out that ROCKWELL was the first American who espoused holocaust denial, which was unheard of at the time. As is elaborated on in the book, ROCKWELL's methods regarding revisionism were often rather low-brow. For instance, he wrote an account of fictitious Nazi atrocities ("as told to Master Sergeant Lew Cor" = ROCKWELL spelled backwards phonetically) and managed to sell it to a trashy pulp magazine called "Sir!" After publication he exposed his own article as a fraud! "Rockwell was to use the magazine article as proof of a "holocaust hoax" for the rest of his life." (see page 50) Another example was a fake "Diary of Anne Fink", considered offensive even by many stormtroopers.
ROCKWELL was also a staunch opponent of the civil rights movement of the 60ies, organizing lots of street activism and releasing a tremendous amount of politically incorrect propaganda against it, at one point even touring Southern states with a "hate bus" (mimicking civil rights activist "freedom riders" trying to de-segregate coaches and bus stations). On 28 August, 1963 the NAACP and other civil rights groups marched on Washington ( where Martin Luther KING delivered his "I have a dream speech"); ROCKWELL staged a counter-march. In January 1964 ROCKWELL would confront KING personally during a NAACP voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. In summer 1966 violent riots broke out in Chicago suburbs, when KING led marches through all-White neighbourhoods. During several speeches he gave there, ROCKWELL drew considerable applause and support. (For those who think that a Nazi America could never happen, think again: the German Nazi party was initially a tiny fringe party as well - a fact that the FBI was also aware of and pointed out in a memorandum, contending that given increased civil unrest and economic breakdown the ANP could indeed
gain tremendous influence or even seize power.)
While ROCKWELL hated MLK, he found common ground with black nationalists Elijah MUHAMMAD, Malcolm X (whom he genuinely admired) and their Nation of Islam, their shared political aim being the repatriation of Blacks to Africa.
In 1965 ROCKWELL even run in the Virginian gubernatorial election (although he failed to gain many votes).
A fascinating aspect of the book is the variety of members the ANP attracted, ranging from intellectual academics like Karl ALLEN or William L. PIERCE to ex-convicts, thrill-seekers and social misfits. There were also law enforcement and media infiltrators.
What really surprised me was the amount of contradiction in the ANP: party officer J. V. MORGAN was a Native American/Caucasian half-breed. Another party officer, Dan BURROS, was in fact Jewish! (He shot himself when a newpaper article revealed his ancestry.) Stormtrooper Roger FOSS recalls visiting a New York supporter on a fund raising trip; to his surprise the supporter lived with a Jewish girlfriend, who was supportive of her friend's beliefs and made swastika paintings!
HATE is an outstanding book. It is an exciting and hugely interesting book. The biography is based on a wealth of sources, from FBI files, ANP propaganda pamphlets and newspapers to lots of correspondence and interviews with people who knew ROCKWELL personally, including Dr. William L. PIERCE, Matt KOEHLER, Colin JORDAN and John TYNDALL as well as ROCKWELL's secretary, various stormtroopers and childhood friends. The text is nicely accompanied by about two dozen photographs.
I appreciate the fairness of the book; while ROCKWELL is not demonized, occasionally the biographer expresses his unfavorable views on the man. I would very much prefer to let the reader come to his own conclusions.
Another shortcoming of the book is the lack of in-depth analysis of ROCKWELL's book White Power. Instead of a sadly missing examination and discussion of the ideas expressed therein, the topic is barely touched upon.
I also realize that HATE could be of great interest to readers interested in the freedom of speech issue. There was considerable debate on whether or not ROCKWELL should be allowed to speak e.g. during his many college lectures. Although you will be likely shocked by ROCKWELL's views, his life was fascinating (and in my view would make a good movie bio-pic!) Required reading for history buffs, students of political fringe groups and anyone interested in political matters!
- Amazon Customer Review
• "my Guys Are Like Monks, This Is Almost Like A Monastery, A Hate Monastery."
18 June, 2008
So proclaimed American Nazi Party (ANP) founder and leader George Lincoln Rockwell, as quoted in William Schmaltz's biography Hate (p. 210). Rockwell, whose tawdry career as a political agitator ended in 1967 when he was gunned down by a disgruntled colleague, was big on words like "hate." For him, they conveyed an honesty that he thought missing from conventional American politics. Given his strong PR sensibilities, he also knew that extreme language attracted the press. (As he said many times, for example, the word "Nazi" caught media attention in a way that less inflammatory words couldn't.)
Schmaltz's biography is a chronicle of Rockwell's transformation from the son of a vaudeville couple to the pipe-smoking, cross-armed leader of a political movement whose actual membership never numbered much more than 100. Schmaltz quickly traces Rockwell's student years, his enlistment in the Navy, his early efforts at advertising and publishing, and his two failed marriages before swinging into a year-by-year account of Rockwell's life from his founding of the ANP in 1959 to his death.
Rockwell preferred to think of himself and his "Stormtroopers" as agitators. He was masterful in a two-fisted, blunt sort of way at manipulating the press, staging guerrilla theatre events that disrupted public meetings, and using audience-appropriate speech when speaking to different groups. In the last three or four years of his life he was a regular speaker on college campuses, traveling from coast to coast. His 1965 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, while bringing him fewer than 6,000 votes, successfully gained him national media coverage.
The Rockwell that comes across in Schmaltz's biography is clearly an intelligent man with a lot of drive and discipline. But there's also an uncanny brokenness in him that's sometimes frightening and sometimes merely clownish. He throws out the coarsest racist labels without batting an eye; he tells a Canadian broadcaster that he wants to "gas queers"; he obsessively harps on the "Jewish menace," and just as obsessively insists on the racial superiority of whites to blacks; he tells student audiences, in perfect seriousness, that he'll be president of the US one day; and he likens Hitler to Christ and himself to St. Paul. He seems to thrive on a mixture of bravado, delusion, and hatred that's sometimes so buffoonish it's difficult to believe that he actually took himself seriously.
Unfortunately, it's not at all clear from Schmaltz's treatment how to understand Rockwell's brokenness. There's very little effort at getting inside the man. Instead, Schmaltz's treatment is for the most part a sometimes tiresomely listing of the external events in Rockwell's life. But at the end of the book, one still has no good sense of what makes Rockwell in particular or hatemongers in general tick. Rockwell remains elusive, enigmatic.
In fairness to Schmaltz, I should mention that he based much of his research on thousands of pages of FBI documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. None of Rockwell's ex-wives, children, or siblings would allow themselves to be interviewed. Moreover, one begins to wonder if Rockwell became so fixated on creating a public persona that less and less of the "real" Rockwell remained. Perhaps all this explains, at least in part, why the "inner" Rockwell is largely absent from Schmaltz's biography.
- Amazon Customer Review
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