William Luther Pierce

Pierce in a high school military academy uniform

William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta.[1] The son of William Luther Pierce Jr. and Marguerite Farrell, his Presbyterian family was of English and Scotch-Irish descent. Pierce's younger brother, Sanders, an engineer, was born in 1936, and later assisted Pierce in his political activities.[9] His father was born in Christiansburg, Virginia in 1892. His mother was born in Richland, Georgia in 1910, with her family being part of the aristocracy of the Old South, descendants of Thomas H. Watts, the Governor of Alabama and Attorney General of the Confederate States of America.[10] After the American Civil War, the family lived a working-class existence.[11] Pierce's father once served as a government representative on ocean-going cargo ships and sent reports back to Washington, D.C.;[12] he later became manager of an insurance agency but was killed in a car accident in 1942.[13] After the elder Pierce's death, the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and after that to Dallas.[14]

Pierce performed well in school, skipping one grade. His last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas.[13] As a teenager his hobbies and interests were model rockets, chemistry, radios, electronics, and reading science fiction.[12]

After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He was injured when a four-inch (10 cm) pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman.[15] Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics.[2][3] He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, initially at Caltech during 1955–56.[2][16] At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962.[1][3] He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.[17]

His tenure as assistant professor at Oregon State University coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and later the counterculture.[18] The former, along with the protests against the Vietnam War, he regarded as being led by Jews.[16] In 1965 to finance his political ambitions, Pierce left his tenure at Oregon State University and relocated to North Haven, Connecticut, to work as a senior researcher at the Advanced Materials Research and Development Laboratory of aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.[14]

After a brief membership in the anti-communist John Birch Society in 1962, he resigned because the Society was uninvolved in race issues.[13][19] After he moved to Washington, D.C. he became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. During this time he was the editor of the party's quarterly ideological journal, National Socialist World.[16][19] When Rockwell was murdered in 1967, Pierce became one of the leading members of the National Socialist White People's Party, the successor to the ANP.

In 1968, Pierce left the NSWPP and joined Youth for Wallace, an organization supporting the bid for the presidency of George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama.[2] In 1970, along with Willis Carto he reconfigured Youth for Wallace into the National Youth Alliance. However, a complex dispute between the two men had begun by the late 1960s. By 1971, Pierce and Carto were openly feuding with the latter accusing the former of the theft of the Liberty Lobby mailing list. These issues caused the NYA to split, and by 1974 Pierce's wing became known as the National Alliance.[20][3] Among the founding members of the board of the National Alliance was a University of Illinois professor of classics, Revilo P. Oliver, who was to have major impact of Pierce's life both as an adviser and friend.[21]

The National Alliance was organized in 1974. Pierce intended the organization to be a political vanguard that would ultimately bring about a white nationalist overthrow of the United States Federal Government. Pierce spent the rest of his life living in West Virginia. From this location, he hosted a weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices from 1991,[16] the internal newsletter National Alliance Bulletin (formerly called Action), and oversaw his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), Free Speech and Resistance, as well as books published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. (many of which promoted Holocaust denial) and the "white power" record company, Resistance Records, which Pierce supported from its inception around 1993 and purchased outright in 1999.[22] On the topic of the Holocaust, he believed that the number of deaths has been exaggerated, and that many of the details had been fabricated.[23]

In 1978, claiming that the National Alliance was an educational organization, Pierce applied for and was denied, tax exemption by the Internal Revenue Service.[3] Pierce appealed, but an appellate court upheld the IRS decision.[3] Around the same time, he was interviewed by Herbert Poinsett on Race and Reason, a public-access television cable TV talk show.[24]

An anti-Zionist, he attempted during the Yom Kippur War to force McDonnell Douglas into canceling military contracts that sent armaments to Israel by buying shares of the company's stock and putting forward the motion at the national shareholder's meeting. The company rejected the motion and continued supplying Israel with weapons. Some of Pierce's later speeches on American Dissident Voices concerning the Arab–Israeli conflict were reprinted in Muslim publications and on websites, including that of the Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah.[25]

In 1985, Pierce moved his operations from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346-acre (1.40 km²) location in Mill Point, West Virginia, that he paid for with $95,000 in cash.[3] At this location, he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church.[3] In 1986, the church applied again, this time successfully, for federal, state, and local tax exemptions. It lost its state tax exemption for all but 60 acres, which had to be exclusively used for religious purposes.[26] The other 286 acres (1.16 km²) parcel was used for both the National Alliance headquarters and the National Vanguard Books business and warehouse, and was denied state tax exemption.

In 1990, the documentary series Different Drummer produced a portrait of Pierce, which was aired on PBS.[27] He later participated twice on a public-access television cable TV live talk show hosted by Ron Doggett, Race and Reality and aired from Richmond, Virginia.[28][29]

Pierce was frequently described as a neo-Nazi,[1][2][3][25][4][30][5] although he personally rejected this label.[31] When confronted with the issue by Mike Wallace on 60 minutes, Pierce described the term as a slander:

I admire many things that Hitler wrote, many of the programs and policies that he instituted in Germany, but we do not blindly copy anyone else's policies or programs. We've formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today.[31]

In 1998, Pierce was a contributor to a documentary produced by the Discovery Channel about white nationalism in the United States.[32] As the leader of the National Alliance, Pierce established contacts with other nationalist groups in Europe, including the National Democratic Party of Germany and the Greek Golden Dawn party.[3] Pierce's other recruiting efforts included a 51-minute[25] informational video titled America is a Changing Country,[33] and forming an anti-globalization group – the Anti-Globalization Action Network – to protest at the G8 summit in Canada in June 2002.[25]

Pierce's last public speech was made in Cleveland, Ohio on April 28, 2002.[34] On July 23, 2002, he died of renal failure, three weeks after being diagnosed with cancer which had spread through his body.[6] At the time, the National Alliance was bringing in more than $1 million a year, with more than 1,500 members, a paid national staff of 17 full-time officials, and was better known than at any time in its history, after which it entered a period of internal conflict and decline.

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Pierce gained attention following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as the individual responsible Timothy McVeigh was influenced by The Turner Diaries (1978), the novel written by Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.[3][8][35] 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" (especially Jews, gay people, and those in interracial marriages or relationships) in the public streets of Los Angeles, followed by the systematic ethnic cleansing of the city, and eventually the entire world. This violence and killing is called "terrible yet absolutely necessary". 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 (a reorganized SS).

The part most relevant to the McVeigh case is in an early chapter, when the book's main character is placed in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters.[3] Some have pointed out similarities between the bombing in the book and the actual bombing in Oklahoma City that damaged the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found in his car, with several phrases highlighted, including "But the real value of all of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties" and "We can still find them and kill them."[36][37]

The Turner Diaries also inspired a group of white revolutionary nationalists in the early 1980s who called themselves the Silent Brotherhood, or sometimes simply The Order.[3] The Order was an offshoot of the Aryan Nations. They were tired of being merely "armchair revolutionaries". The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting and bank robbery, and supposedly gave money to the Alliance.[3] The Order's leader, Robert Jay Mathews, died in a stand-off with police and federal agents on Whidbey Island, Washington when police fired flares into his hideout, igniting a fire. Other Order members including David Lane were captured and sent to federal prisons. In 1996 Pierce sold the rights to The Turner Diaries to the Jewish publisher Lyle Stuart.[38]

On May 19, 1996, Pierce was interviewed on 60 Minutes,[31][39] during which Pierce was asked by Mike Wallace if he approved of the Oklahoma City bombing, and he replied "No. No, I don't. I've said that over and over again, that I do not approve of the Oklahoma City bombing because the United States is not yet in a revolutionary situation."[31] A year earlier in a telephone interview with The Washington Post, he was quoted as saying: "the Oklahoma City bombing didn't make sense politically. Terrorism only makes sense if it can be sustained over a period of time. One day there will be real, organized terrorism done according to plan, aimed at bringing down the government."[40]

In 1989, again under the Andrew Macdonald pen name, 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.[41] 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".[42]