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William Luther Pierce

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William Luther Pierce
Pierce in 2001
Born
William Luther Pierce III

(1933-09-11)September 11, 1933
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
DiedJuly 23, 2002(2002-07-23) (aged 68)
Mill Point, West Virginia, U.S.
Other namesAndrew Macdonald
EducationAllen Military Academy
Alma mater
Occupations
OrganizationNational Alliance
Notable work
MovementNeo-Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-globalization
Spouses
Patricia Jones
​
​
(m. 1956; div. 1982)​
Elizabeth Prostel
​
​
(m. 1982; div. 1985)​
Olga Skerlecz
​
​
(m. 1986; div. 1990)​
Zsuzsannah
​
​
(m. 1991; div. 1996)​
"Irena"
​
​
(m. 1997)​
Children2
Signature

William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and far-right 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 was author of the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The former has inspired multiple hate crimes 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 to a Presbyterian family of Scotch-Irish and English descent, Pierce graduated from high school in 1952 and he went on to receive a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University in 1955 as well as a doctorate from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1962. He became an assistant professor of physics at the 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 to receive tax exemption for his organization. Pierce spent the rest of his life in West Virginia hosting a weekly show, American Dissident Voices, publishing the internal newsletter National Alliance Bulletin (formerly titled Action), and overseeing his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), Free Speech and Resistance, 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 and education

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Pierce in a high school military academy uniform

William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia on September 11, 1933. His family moved to Texas when Pierce was four years old.[1] The son of William Luther Pierce Jr. and Marguerite Farrell, his Presbyterian family was of Scotch-Irish and English descent. Pierce's younger brother, Flournoy Sanders, an engineer, assisted Pierce in his political activities.[2]

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.[3][4] After the American Civil War, the family lived a working-class existence.[5] Pierce's father once served as a government representative on ocean-going cargo ships and sent reports back to Washington, D.C.;[6] he later became manager of an insurance agency but was killed in a car accident in 1942.[4]

Pierce performed well in school; his last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas.[4] As a teen, he said that he had been "sort of a nerdy kid without social skills", awkward around women and with few friends.[1] His teenage hobbies and interests were model rockets, chemistry, radios, electronics, and reading science fiction, particularly the pulp magazine Planet Stories.[6][1]

After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He was injured when a pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman.[7] Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics.[8][9] He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, initially at Caltech during 1955–56.[8][10] At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962.[11][9][1] He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.[12]

His tenure as assistant professor at Oregon State University coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement and later the counterculture.[13][1] During his education, Pierce had 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.[14] He was inflamed by a supposed 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. Pierce said of himself that he had "a turn of mind that leads me to exaggerate and oversimplify things for the sake of better understanding" which he admitted could be dangerous, but said it "helps me get to the essence of things"; a colleague said to the FBI that Pierce wanted "a simple solution to the problems of the world".[15] He blamed Jews for the civil rights movement, along with the protests against the Vietnam War.[10]

Politics

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American Nazi Party

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Beginning in 1962, he was briefly a member of the anti-communist John Birch Society. He resigned the next year, viewing them as "too passive" because the Society was uninvolved in racial issues.[16][4][17] In 1963, he 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. He moved to Connecticut to work as a defense contractor in 1965, and began visiting Rockwell's base in Washington, D.C., also reading alarmist books about race at the Yale University Library.[15] Influential on his political thought at the time were the works of Francis Parker Yockey, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant.[16] He and Rockwell became increasingly close, and Pierce was granted government clearance through his job. He was not openly racist with his coworkers; when the ANP were 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".[15] After only a few months of work, his performance worsened and he quit abruptly after less than a year of employment, claiming he had been writing hours a day for months and wished to be a writer.[18]

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.[19] In 1966, he 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. He was a close advisor to Rockwell and functioned as the ANP's "house intellectual".[20][16][21] Pierce advised Rockwell on power and media tactics, largely responsible for Rockwell's publicity success with the 1966 Chicago "White Power" marches.[19] 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.[22] During this time Pierce alluded to unspecified "other problems" that could only be solved through what was implied to be genocide, which according to Rockwell biographer Frederick J. Simonelli, Pierce "prudently avoided specifying" in writing.[23]

Pierce advocated Nordic superiority within the movement and said the leaders of the group should only come from "pure Germanic stock".[19] He disliked and insulted ANP member John Patler on account of his ethnically Greek background, as did high ranking ANP member Matthias 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.[24] Rockwell was murdered by John Patler in 1967.[22] Though most members of the ANP agreed that Patler was responsible, some disagreed with that, instead arguing there was a conspiracy and Koehl, Pierce, and a man named Robert Allison Lloyd had orchestrated Rockwell's murder.[25] The day before the murder, Rockwell got into an argument with Pierce, Koehl, and Lloyd. One eyewitness claimed that he locked the three 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.[26]

Afterwards Pierce stayed in the ANP (now named the National Socialist White People's Party, or NSWPP), under the leadership of Koehl, becoming one of its primary leaders. He affiliated with several different movements and became prominent as an organizer and leader of the white nationalist movement; the FBI investigated him, with their file on him growing to hundreds of pages long, though he was never charged for any crime. Pierce attempted to organize university students to the cause and promoted a philosophy of "total revolution", bringing in young militant neo-Nazis into the party. Pierce felt their continual display of explicit Nazi regalia hurt their recruitment, and as a result fell out with the rest of Rockwell's successors. The "total revolution" philosophy annoyed Koehl, and he expelled Pierce in 1970.[27][20] He then joined Youth for Wallace, an organization supporting the bid for the presidency of George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama.[28] 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.[29][9][28] 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.[30]

National Alliance

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Main article: National Alliance (United States)
Pierce at a 1999 National Alliance meeting in Hillsboro, West Virginia

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,[10] 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.[31]

In 1978, claiming the National Alliance was an educational organization, Pierce applied for and was denied, tax exemption by the Internal Revenue Service.[9] Pierce appealed, but an appellate court upheld the IRS decision.[9] 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.[32]

In 1985, Pierce moved his operations from Arlington County, Virginia, to a 346-acre (1.40 km2) location in Mill Point, West Virginia, which he paid for with $95,000 in cash. At this location, he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church.[9] 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.[33]

Pierce was frequently described as a neo-Nazi,[11][8][9][13] although he personally rejected this label.[34] 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.[34]

As the leader of the National Alliance, Pierce established contacts with other nationalist groups in Europe, including the National Democratic Party of Germany, the British National Party (BNP), and the Greek Golden Dawn party.[9] He also had ties to BNP leader John Tyndall.[11] Pierce's other attempts to recruit included a 51-minute informational video and forming an anti-globalization group – the Anti-Globalization Action Network – to protest at the G8 summit in Canada in June 2002.[32]

In 2000, he was profiled in a biography entitled The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds by academic Robert S. Griffin.[35][36] The biography was authorized by Pierce,[36] and was generally seen as too sympathetic to him. Pierce himself praised the book.[37][38][39]

Novels

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Pierce published two novels under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.[40]

The Turner Diaries

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Main article: The Turner Diaries

Pierce gained attention following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who was said to be inspired by Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries (1978).[9][41][42] It had started as a serial in the NA paper Attack! in 1975.[27] 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 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.[9] When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found in his car, with several phrases highlighted.[43][44] 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.[45]

The Turner Diaries also 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 and bank robbery, and supposedly gave money to the Alliance.[9]

Hunter

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Main article: Hunter (Pierce novel)

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.[46] 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".[47]

Religion

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In the 1970s, Pierce adopted the religious philosophy of cosmotheism, based on a mixture of German romanticism, the Darwinian concept of natural selection, and Pierce's interpretation of George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman. The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center both allege that Pierce utilized cosmotheism in order to acquire tax-exempt status for the National Alliance after he had failed to do so earlier.[8][9] In 2001, Pierce officiated the Cosmotheist wedding ceremony of Billy Roper, then a top staffer at the National Alliance.[48]

Personal life

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Pierce was married five times. His first marriage was to Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They were married in 1957 and had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960.[2][1] According to Kelvin Pierce, his father was emotionally and physically abusive. In 2020, Kelvin coauthored Sins of My Father, which chronicled his experiences with his father.[49]

William Luther Pierce's marriage with Patricia Jones ended in divorce in 1982.[50] The same year, Pierce married Elizabeth Prostel whom he met in the National Alliance office in Arlington. The marriage ended in 1985 and Pierce moved his headquarters to southern West Virginia.[9] Preferring immigrant women from Eastern Europe,[8] in 1986 Pierce married a Hungarian woman named Olga Skerlecz. She is a relative of Iván Skerlecz, Governor of Croatia-Slavonia; the marriage lasted until 1990. Olga moved to California after their divorce.[50] Pierce then married another Hungarian woman named Zsuzsannah in early 1991. They met through an advertisement that Pierce placed in a Hungarian women's magazine aimed at arranging international marriages. Leaving him in the summer of 1996, Zsuzsannah moved to Florida. His last marriage in 1997, which lasted until his death, was to another Hungarian woman, known under the pseudonym "Irena". The marriage between Irena and Pierce was troubled, as he was reportedly "sharp and condescending" leaving her miserable living with him.[8]

Death

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Pierce died of kidney failure at his Hillsboro, West Virginia compound on July 23, 2002, three weeks after being diagnosed with cancer that had spread through his body.[51] Shortly before his death, Pierce selected Erich Gliebe as his successor; Gliebe was the manager of Resistance Records.[52]

Works

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As William Luther Pierce:

  • "Who We Are" (2012)
  • "Cosmotheism: Divine Aryan Consciousness from Man to Super-Man" (2013) (with Fred Streed & Kevin Alfred Strom)

As Andrew Macdonald:

In 1993, Pierce wrote the script of the comic book New World Order Comix #1: The Saga of White Will!! which was illustrated by Daniel "Rip" Roush and colored by William White Williams.[53]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f Berger 2016a, p. 7.
  2. ^ a b Griffin 2001, p. 33.
  3. ^ Griffin 2001, p. 30
  4. ^ a b c d Morris, Travis (2017). Dark Ideas: How Neo-Nazi and Violent Jihadi Ideologues Shaped Modern Terrorism. Lexington Books. pp. 34–35. ISBN 978-0-7391-9105-7.
  5. ^ Griffin 2001, p. 36
  6. ^ a b Griffin 2001, p. 31
  7. ^ Griffin 2001, p. 34
  8. ^ a b c d e f "William Pierce". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved March 16, 2021. America's most important neo-Nazi for some three decades until his death in 2002.
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Extremism in America: William Pierce". Anti-Defamation League. Archived from the original on January 16, 2013.
  10. ^ a b c Sutherland, John (May 22, 1997). "Higher Man". London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 10. ISSN 0260-9592. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
  11. ^ a b c Reed, Christopher (July 25, 2002). "William Pierce". The Guardian. London. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
  12. ^ "Pierce, William L". Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Modern Political Biography. Oxon Helicon Publishing Limited. 2004. p. 604. ISBN 978-1-85986-273-5.
  13. ^ a b Johnston, David Cay (July 24, 2002). "William Pierce, 69, Neo-Nazi Leader, Dies". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved March 16, 2021.
  14. ^ Berger 2016a, pp. 7–8.
  15. ^ a b c Berger 2016a, p. 8.
  16. ^ a b c Simonelli 1999, p. 124.
  17. ^ Vohryzek Bolden, Miki; Olson-Raymer, Gayle; Whamond, Jeffery O. (2001). Domestic Terrorism and Incident Management: Issues and Tactics. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher Ltd. p. 115. ISBN 9780398083083.
  18. ^ Berger 2016a, pp. 8–9.
  19. ^ a b c Simonelli 1999, pp. 124–125.
  20. ^ a b Gardell 2003, p. 134.
  21. ^ Schmaltz 1999, p. 283.
  22. ^ a b Simonelli 1999, p. 129.
  23. ^ Simonelli 1999, p. 125.
  24. ^ Simonelli 1999, pp. 102, 136.
  25. ^ Simonelli 1999, pp. 132, 137.
  26. ^ Simonelli 1999, pp. 137–138.
  27. ^ a b Berger 2016a, p. 9.
  28. ^ a b Schmaltz 1999, p. 338.
  29. ^ Beirich, Heidi (November 30, 2008). "Willis Carto: The First Major Biography". Intelligence Report. No. Winter 2008. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
  30. ^ Griffin 2001, p. 128
  31. ^ "National Alliance Leader William Pierce Hopes to Acquire Hate Label, Resistance Records". Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center. December 15, 1999. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  32. ^ a b "William Pierce, founder and leader of National Alliance, dead at 68". Anti-Defamation League. 2004. Archived from the original on December 3, 2006. Retrieved July 18, 2007.
  33. ^ "The National Alliance: A History". Anti-Defamation League. 2007. Archived from the original on August 19, 2007. Retrieved July 18, 2007.
  34. ^ a b Dr. William Pierce Interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes (Reportage). CBS. 1996. Archived from the original on October 22, 2013. Retrieved May 15, 2010.
  35. ^ Michael 2003, pp. 63, 77.
  36. ^ a b Berger 2016a, p. 20.
  37. ^ Romano, Aja (January 28, 2021). "How a dystopian neo-Nazi novel helped fuel decades of white supremacist terrorism". Vox. Retrieved February 16, 2025.
  38. ^ Lee, Martin A. (Fall 2002). "Sympathy for the Devil: A Vermont academic writes a fawning biography of America's late neo-Nazi leader". Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on February 16, 2010. Retrieved February 16, 2025.
  39. ^ Harkavy, Ward (November 14, 2000). "The Nazi on the Bestseller List". The Village Voice. New York City. ISSN 0042-6180. Retrieved February 18, 2025.
  40. ^ Gardell 2003, p. 91.
  41. ^ "The Turner Diaries". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
  42. ^ Berger, J.M. (September 16, 2016). "Alt History". The Atlantic. ISSN 1072-7825. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
  43. ^ "'Turner Diaries' introduced in McVeigh trial". CNN. April 28, 1997. Archived from the original on May 3, 2001. Retrieved October 21, 2014.
  44. ^ Jackson, Camille (October 14, 2004). "The Turner Diaries, Other Racist Novels, Inspire Extremist Violence". SPLC. Retrieved October 21, 2014.
  45. ^ Berger 2016a, p. 30.
  46. ^ Mills, David (May 16, 1993). "Don't Think Twice, It's All White". The Washington Post. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
  47. ^ Gardell 2003, p. 360.
  48. ^ Kurczy, Stephen (2021). The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence (First ed.). New York: Dey St., imprint of William Morrow. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-06-294549-5. OCLC 1262787695.
  49. ^ Darby, Seyward (March 31, 2021). "The father, the son and the racist spirit: being raised by a white supremacist". The Guardian. London. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved January 12, 2022.
  50. ^ a b Griffin 2001, p. 39.
  51. ^ Gettleman, Jeffrey (July 24, 2002). "William L. Pierce, 68; Ex-Rocket Scientist Became White Supremacist". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
  52. ^ Michael 2003, p. 76.
  53. ^ "New World Order Comix - The Saga Of White Will!!" – via Internet Archive.

Works cited

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Further reading

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