My expedition into the extremist right-wing corners of the white American mind began in November 1992, when Amendment 2 passed in my home state of Colorado. I had just moved to New Mexico to pursue a Ph.D. in history at the University of New Mexico, but I deliberately maintained my voting status in Colorado for a couple of extra months specifically so that I could vote against that legislation. Blatantly homophobic and overtly discriminatory, Amendment 2 ensured that gays, lesbians, and bisexual peoples had no recourse if they were fired or denied housing on the basis of their sexual orientation and stripped them of any basis on which to claim discrimination. Orchestrated by Colorado for Family Values (CFV), a right-wing Christian fundamentalist group based in Colorado Springs, Amendment 2 shocked pundits and progressives everywhere because it had passed (52 percent to 48 percent) in what people thought was a "liberal" Western state.

I knew how the amendment had passed. I had been watching CFV's grassroots campaign for at least six months. It was a masterpiece of spin and organization, employing such catch phrases as "family values," "fairness," and "no special rights" to downplay its exclusionist message. CFV's foot soldiers also knew their target audience. They didn't expend much effort in the heavily populated Denver/Boulder area, considered urban and socially progressive. Instead, they concentrated on smaller rural communities that tended to be more conservative, especially where God and sodomy are concerned.

When the returns rolled in, I felt as though I and my progressive views had been ridden out of town on a rail, like an outlaw whose worldview of her home state was completely transformed for the worst. Barely settled in New Mexico, I had no ties yet to my new home and those I felt to my old had been cut—without my consent, without my participation, without a chance to really draw battle lines. I felt as if the earth had been ripped from under my feet. I had grown up in rural Colorado and graduated from high school in a town of 3,000. The people who had voted "yes" included people with who I had gone to school, people who had been neighbors. I felt an almost overwhelming sense of sadness that spin had trumped logic and that many of my friends no longer felt welcome in Colorado. The passing of Amendment 2 was thus intensely personal for me. Perhaps not the best reason to pursue a topic of research, but it was the one that initiated my first analyses.

Six months later, I was poring over CFV campaign literature and comparing it to the rhetoric espoused by the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Colorado. This was when I discovered that, although the targets had changed, the underlying ideological message had not: White America is under attack from outside forces that must be stopped if the greatness of this country were to be maintained. My research became a paper that I presented in 1994, a month after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 that Amendment 2 was unconstitutional. I still hadn't figured out what I hoped to discover during the course of my work, but I realized something about the American public. CFV had gotten a reputation as a group of hate-filled "fascist," obsessive, mean-spirited religious fanatics lurking on the fringes of American society. I wasn't ready to make that declaration yet, since I felt that CFV and the 1920s Klan knew exactly what they were doing and that they were tapping into extant American historical and social currents.

By early 1995, I was well on my way to researching my dissertation, which dealt with white supremacist groups in the American West. The Randy Weaver and Waco standoffs were adding fuel to a burgeoning militia movement in rural America, and I felt a pressing need to figure out why this was occurring and where the strands of white supremacist ideology in this country came from. Following the horrific bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, I began to realize that there was something uniquely American about the white supremacist movement I was studying, that there were links to mainstream conservative rhetoric and ideology, and that there was something about sacred American myths regarding character and identity that indicated to me that the right-wing lunatic fringe really wasn't lunatic or on the fringe. Although I still took a personal interest in the movement because of the elections of 1992, I had come to see that the project was bigger than me and that it resonated across centuries.

Consequently, this journey through the American white supremacist movement has been at once intensely disturbing but also gratifying, if such can be said. I have suffered bouts of depression from reading pages of vile racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic rhetoric. I have physically blanched at white supremacist websites that espouse horrific violence against people of color and people of Jewish descent. I have taken showers after archival research, feeling the need to wash imaginary grime from my skin, hoping to erase the effects of hysterical, conspiracy-laden discourse and its stifling bitterness.

But I have also learned deeper lessons. I examine and question the privileges my skin color conveys in American society and culture. I have learned to question many sides of an issue, think about what it means to be white, and understand that painting an opposing viewpoint with an extremist brush can serve to detract attention from mainstream rhetoric that conveys the same messages. I have come to understand, too, that there are very real consequences for the people white supremacists target in their rhetoric. To dismiss their beliefs as "fringe" or "extremist" does not guarantee a cessation of potential violence directed at people of color, Jews, or those among us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered.

And in spite of my own leftist and progressive politics, I have been able to humanize many of the members of white supremacist groups. It's an uncomfortable balance and one I perhaps have not been able to maintain all the time, a dilemma other researchers no doubt have faced. I am completely opposed to everything white supremacists advocate and represent, but I have tried to understand what drives individuals to the organizations and the movement and what larger forces were and still are at play in American culture.

That said, I think the most important thing I have learned during the course of my travels through the topography of white supremacist ideology and history is that I did as much unpacking as packing of my baggage. All Americans are faced with shifting cultural and social situations, economic anxieties, and increased globalization. We need to remember that we are all part of this American community and that solutions to our problems, whether real or perceived, do not lie in conspiracy theories, scapegoating, or rage. After the work I have been doing, though, I can understand why some of us turn to these approaches for answers. However, all of us have a greater responsibility to one another as fellow Americans and, ultimately, global citizens, to address real inequalities in our social and cultural institutions and hierarchies and find workable, community-based solutions. It will require that we look at ourselves, at our core beliefs, and put our history under a microscope. It will also require us to look at the beliefs and stereotypes many mainstream Americans hold and how they can be used in an extremist context. It will be an uncomfortable and, most likely, painful process in some respects. But to ignore the extreme right—to ignore the parts of this country's history that have encouraged this ideology—is to allow it to grow and spread unchecked. The consequences of that, I'm afraid, do not bode well for a united America.

April 19, 1995, dawned gray and cold in Albuquerque. I caught the first reports from Oklahoma City around 10:30 A.M. Mountain Standard Time. The news about the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was confused. A gas line explosion. A possible bombing. A structural collapse. By noon, the news had confirmed that a bomb had exploded in front of the building, causing a massive collapse and untold deaths. The media voiced suppositions about Middle Eastern terrorists. I disagreed. By 10:00 P.M. that night, no Middle Eastern terrorist organization had claimed responsibility and, based on information I had been collecting for three years, I suspected that the terrorist was right here at home, probably a white man in his twenties or thirties.

The clues piled up. April 19 is the anniversary of the Branch Davidian immolation in Waco (1993). The Murrah Building housed various U.S. government agencies, including a few Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. And I did not think Oklahoma City was a likely target for foreign terrorist groups. I had been tracking and researching the American extremist right since 1992 and had a feeling that the terrible tragedy unfolding in Oklahoma City was the product of this movement and its venomous rhetoric that often includes antigoverment sentiment. The nightmare suspicions proved true.

How could this happen? How could an American citizen and soldier kill 168 American men, women, and children? We would like to think that Timothy McVeigh, the man arrested and executed for the bombing, was an aberration, unstable, so we may explain away the horrific occurrence and try to make sense of a senseless situation. On some level, we are correct in these conclusions. McVeigh, however, did not emerge from the background fringes of American society and culture as an anomaly. He is part of an American political and social tradition at least two centuries old. We can locate right-wing (whether extreme or not) sentiment, demonstrations, and organizations throughout modern American history since the eighteenth century. The underlying tenets and ideological expressions of rightist extremism have proven remarkably resilient over time. What have changed are the trappings, packaging, and available technology for extremist recruitment and terrorist acts.

In this book, I will trace and analyze the growth and development since 1970 of certain extreme right-wing groups that are sympathetic to white supremacist doctrine. I have chosen groups that have operated generally in the western United States that envision the region as the eventual site of a white American homeland. I will address how these groups construct "manhood" and "masculinity" and how these constructions reflect popular historical conceptions about "the West" as a symbol of freedom, an opportunity for conquest, and an escape from the conditions of life in modern industrial society. These constructions of masculinity and the West are connected to people's desires to change their situations, desires that reflect their need for self-transformation.

I will also bring into the discussion other strands of American history that have played roles in white supremacist groups and have managed to find expression since the period of this country's founding, which involved westward expansion and the creation of a national identity. These include vigilantism, fraternalism, and political and social extremism (specifically rightist). Historically, these "-isms" have enabled men to group together and attempt to enact local and federal policies that maintain male (generally white) power, whether political, social, or economic.

I am not suggesting that white supremacy derives from these historical currents. Rather, I am arguing that these historical traditions have, in some cases, encouraged some white men to enact white supremacist goals. My point is that the foundations of American nationalism, which are based on ideas about "divine mission" and westward expansion, have lent themselves quite handily to exclusionist rhetoric and policies toward nonwhite people. Again, a majority of white Americans neither subscribe to racist beliefs nor run out and join white supremacist groups. However, the very nature of what it means to be "American" can itself provide justification and ideological groundwork for those who do.

I want to make very clear that the personal reasons people have for joining white supremacist groups are myriad. Those who have participated and who still are participating in groups or the movement as a whole come from a variety of backgrounds and households. Most, however, join because they feel somehow "displaced" or "disenfranchised" from society at large. It's a subjective perspective and depends on the person involved. What is apparent, however, is that the movement is largely male.

"Gender is unquestionably an important organizing principle for racist groups," Kathleen Blee states. "Aryan masculinity," she continues, "is venerated as the bedrock of the white race, racist politics as the litmus test of masculine prowess." Assumptions about what it means to be a man are critical in the movement's methods of appealing to white men. Blee noted that throughout American history, "racist groups have trumpeted the idea that white men are in imminent danger of losing their proper economic, political, and social place to undeserving white women and to nonwhite men and women."

The white supremacist movement in the United States is thus all about manhood. More specifically, white manhood and what it means to be a white man in America, whether historically, in the present, or the future. My purpose here is to look at why that might be and what underpinnings in the essence of what it means to be American lend themselves to the existence of white supremacy in this country. I have focused on the West, not just because it's where I'm from personally, but also because I'm interested in how ideas about the West and manhood have historically infused American nationalism and notions about "character," which in turn have found expression in white supremacist rhetoric.

The iconography of "the West" promises a translation of the self into something purer and more authentic. White supremacist groups and their rhetoric are also tied to older patterns of American expansion and nationalism and to recurring patterns of what I have dubbed "frontierism"—the attempt to resurrect an imagined, romanticized past inhabited by white archetypes triumphing over land and human others, often eking out a living by the sweat of their white male Protestant brows.

Primary among popular constructions of "the West" are symbols such as "cowboy," "six-shooter" (guns), and "vigilante." Other constructions include ideas about "frontier" as place, process, and proving ground. Characterizations of westerners (particularly men) include "rugged individualism," "courageous," "strong," and "independent." The list goes on, because we all know and contribute to it. We have seen "Western" films. We are familiar with "Western" novels. From the 1920s through the 1970s, hundreds of nationally distributed feature Western films provided the general American population with a steady dose of big sky country. In 1959 alone, no fewer than thirty-five Westerns ran concurrently on television and eight of the top ten shows had Western themes. John Wayne, as Western hero, became a leading symbol of American masculinity from World War II to Vietnam.

Even during the 1980s and on into the 1990s, "Western"-themed films graced theaters nationwide. Included in those offerings were Rhinestone (1984), Pale Rider (1985), Silverado (1985), Young Guns (1988), Young Guns II (1990), Dances with Wolves (1990), Unforgiven (1992), Tombstone (1993), Wyatt Earp (1994), Legends of the Fall (1995), and Maverick (1995). After 1995, Westerns did not seem as popular at the box office; instead, somewhat edgy "neo-Westerns" and comedies graced the screen including Dean Man (1996), starring Johnny Depp as a man in search of himself; Wild Wild West, with Will Smith (1999); Woody Harrelson, in Cowboy Way (1994) and Hi Lo Country (1998). And Kevin Costner once again returned to the classic good guys versus bad guys Western with his Open Range (2003). An intrinsic theme of typical "Western" films and television programs, movies, comic books, and novels such as these is an implicit understanding about gender. That is, the West is no place for a lady.

This is a part of Western mythology that continues to resurrect itself from the graveyards of cultural expectations. The "cowboy code," outlined by Gene Autry (ironically never a working cowboy himself), provided ten points by which a cowboy is supposed to live. Those included specifications about conduct, integrity, and even hygiene. A cowboy, Autry stated, should never break his word. He should demonstrate gentleness with animals, children, and the elderly. He should never shoot first, never hit a "smaller man," and never take unfair advantage. He must respect women and the laws of his nation. He must be a good worker, help people in distress, and keep clean in thought, action, speech, and body. Cowboys are patriots, Autry enjoined. And they do not harbor racially or religiously intolerant ideas.

Members of right-wing extremist groups, whether they realize it or not, subscribe to most of Autry's rules. That is, they consider themselves the purest of patriots—they are "true" Americans whose government has run amuck. However, all subscribe to racially and religiously intolerant ideas, though most will attempt to justify their position by claiming that they harbor no ill will toward nonwhite people. They simply want a whites-only land and white women to bear the next generations of Aryans.

I will explore here how the "West" is a gendered state of mind and how the men who join right-wing extremist groups—especially groups in the western part of the United States—encode and enact popular notions about the "West" such as individualism, masculinity, and escapism. In particular, I am interested in how the rhetoric of white supremacy has historically enabled what I designate a "culture of masculinity" that has existed throughout the twentieth century and reflected "cowboy" mythology in association with right-wing groups.

The "culture of masculinity" within white supremacist groups tends to be Protestant (if there is a religious preference espoused), patriarchal, and very involved in displays of physical strength and endurance. Many group members are liquor-, cigarette-, and drug-free. They are expected to marry white women, protect them, and propagate with them. White supremacist men believe that, although white women are "help-mates" and should be trained in the use of weapons in case of emergencies, women's primary responsibility is to home, children, and husband.

Ironically, within white supremacist masculine culture is a paradox: though expected to mimic "cowboy" imagery (rugged and independent), the men involved in the movement are also expected to build communities and families. Abby Ferber notes that women have become more of a presence in the movement, and I would argue that it is precisely because of a stronger emphasis on family. "Women," Ferber states, "also make the movement more accessible and less threatening to the mainstream by creating Aryan coloring books for kids and women's Web sites, and home-schooling their children. They contribute to the seeming ordinariness of life in the movement." Ferber notes, however, that women are rarely in positions of leadership in the movement.

The role of women in the white supremacist right is one fraught with contradictions. Most members of white supremacist groups throughout American history have been and continue to be male. This is not to suggest that women have not been welcomed into the movement or that they are barred from membership. Blee and Ferber have examined the complex interplay of gender and racism, demonstrating that women who join white supremacist groups will act independently, stand up for themselves, but will defend the "natural" role of women—the domestic sphere—in relation to men.

In her work with women who join racist organizations, Blee (2002) argues that nearly all of the women she spoke with did not talk about finally finding an outlet for long-held beliefs. Rather, many seemed to have joined almost serendipitously, and the reasons tended to be aligned more with ideas about "social life" than ideology. Blee also discovered that many women she interviewed did not come from what could be described as racist or intolerant household. In fact, racist beliefs were learned after the women joined the groups. Fewer than one-fourth of her interviewees, Blee found, actively sought out white supremacist groups for membership.

Furthermore, those women who are involved seem to experience a wealth of self-doubt about the movement and conditions in the world around them. Many do not seem to "burn with ideological passion" for the cause. Rather, they feel hopeless about societal conditions and the possibility for changing it. Men in the movement talk about their "empowerment," but women give the overall mission of the white supremacist right little chance of success.

Ferber's work has examined the overarching role of men in the movement and how white supremacist groups emphasize the "natural" place of men and women. That is, men are to be the active agents in change and women the domestic support system. However, as she has noted, the advent of the Web has allowed white supremacist groups to appeal to more women and for those women, in turn, to perhaps "soften" the image of racism for a larger mainstream audience.

Blee has argued elsewhere that the Indiana Klan created a women's auxiliary in the 1920s that served as a way to "safeguard" women and "help expand women's legal rights" while at the same time working to preserve white Protestant supremacy. The women Blee interviewed in her study remembered their Klan days as "a time of friendship and solidarity among like-minded women." Women in the organization were expected to conduct themselves in a "respectful" manner, and they were not allowed to hold positions of authority in the Klan. This was something Klan leaders wrestled with: how to define political roles for women while at the same time maintaining male supremacy.

Women here also helped "soften" the Klan's image and, they hoped, make it appealing to a more mainstream following. The overall tenet of the Klan, however, and the white supremacist movement as a whole did not and still has not included women on a level playing field. In other words, though women in recent years (since the late 1990s and early 2000s) have been more involved in the movement and organized white supremacist groups, membership, affiliation, and leadership remain overwhelmingly male. In light of the history of white supremacy in this country and the older mythologies into which it taps, this comes as no surprise.

Although I do not discount the growing membership of women in the current manifestations of white supremacist organizations, or the participation of women historically in these groups, my emphasis here is on men and masculinity and how the movement defines and is defined by ideas about manhood. Women have never held positions of official leadership among white supremacists, and the relationship between men and women in the movement continues to get stuck in this inherent conflict: how to allow women access to political activism while at the same time relegating them to a largely domestic role. The white supremacist right has continually wrestled with this paradox and as long as it does, I would argue, women will never hold positions equal to men in the movement nor will the movement move beyond its primary emphasis on masculinity. Let us turn now to the groups.

The Stage

Since the late 1970s, this country has witnessed a plethora of home-grown so-called white supremacist groups whose members seek to restore the power of white men, segregate races into specific geographic regions of this country, and bring about the downfall of the federal government, which, they believe, is controlled by a secret, powerful cabal of Jewish families and white race traitors. According to these groups, the ultimate goal of "ZOG" (Zionist Occupied Government) is to bring the United States to its knees economically, integrate it with a "New World Order," and place its opponents in concentration camps.

The white race, proponents believe, is the last line of defense against this conspiracy, and they contend that the day of reckoning—the "showdown"—in which ZOG begins its final campaign against them, is upon us. To prepare for this penultimate battle, members of white supremacist groups run secret paramilitary camps, build secluded compounds, conduct survival skills seminars, stockpile food, collect impressive arsenals that include some of the latest military hardware, and spread the word via publications, gun shows, fax machines, phone lines, shortwave radio, and the Internet.

This study focuses on groups based primarily in the western United States that either came west in search of privacy or were founded in western states. Specifically, I examine the neo-Nazi northern Idaho-based Aryan Nations and western-based chapters of the Posse Comitatus. I will also discuss the rise of militias and like-minded so-called Patriot groups since 1992, including Montana's Freemen and the Republic of Texas. I will also address a few smaller groups and several individuals. They include The Order, a paramilitary appendage of Aryan Nations; Gordon Kahl, a Posse sympathizer with ties to North Dakota, Texas, and California; and Randy Weaver, Idaho's best-known white separatist.

Aryan Nations, founded in 1979, was a white supremacist separatist compound whose members advocated self-sufficiency, self-government, and a white homeland that encompasses Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Aryan Nations and like-minded groups also espouse a religious doctrine known as "Christian Identity," a modern incarnation of nineteenth-century British-Israelism, alternately known as Anglo-Israelism. Because Christian Identity is integral in understanding white supremacist doctrine since 1960, I will provide a brief history of it here.

In the most general terms, British-Israelism refers to the belief that the British are lineal descendants of the "ten lost tribes" of Israel. It did not become a basis for an organized movement until the second half of the nineteenth century, with two related but distinguishable tendencies at work: either Britain as a nation was specially chosen by God to help realize a divine design in human history, or some spiritually purified portion of it would take on this role—namely, the United States. British-Israelism, therefore, discounted the role of Jews in scripture as God's chosen people. This belief system made its way to the United States in the latter years of the nineteenth century in the hands of a few male preachers.

Between the world wars, British-Israelism in America began to take on decidedly anti-Semitic and white supremacist overtones as its believers began to conflate the idea of America as the promised land for the true lost tribesmen of Israel (the British) with the notion that Jews had deceived not only people of British descent, but also those of Teutonic descent into believing that Jews are the chosen people. This twentieth-century incarnation of British-Israelism is known as Christian Identity because it fuses biblical fundamentalism (hence the use of "Christian") with the belief that the true "identity" of the chosen people is not Jewish, but Caucasian. This virulently racist interpretation of British-Israelism is, therefore, barely fifty years old, its doctrinal basis established after World War II by a network of independent preachers and writers from whose hands it passed into a variety of extreme right-wing political movements preoccupied with fears of racial mixing and Jewish conspiracy.

Through groups such as Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity had by the 1970s become the most important religious vehicle for white supremacist orthodoxy. It preaches the supremacy of whites—especially white men. It is virulently anti-Semitic and millenarian in outlook and wholly Eurocentric. Identity has served as a binding force for disparate right-wing groups with white supremacist leanings since the late 1970s. Identity has adherents throughout American white supremacist networks. From modern Klan to Posses, it is common ground between groups, enabling the spread of extremist doctrine across party lines.

The Posse Comitatus (literally, "power of the county"), founded in 1969, "is composed of loosely affiliated bands of armed vigilantes and survivalists." Chapters exist all over the country, and its members devote themselves primarily to tax-protest and an anti-federal government stance. The groups' members also believe that an international Zionist conspiracy is behind such government organizations as the Federal Reserve System and Jewish bankers that seek also to undermine American farmers. Posse groups, like Aryan Nations, infuse their rhetoric with Identity theology, calling for white Christians to defend their homes and families against what they believe is an imminent government takeover orchestrated by Jews. Gordon Kahl, a staunch Posse member during the 1970s and early 1980s, died in a 1983 shootout with federal marshals, subsequently attaining martyr status among Posse members and other right-wing extremists.

The militia movement and its larger umbrella, the Patriot movement, formed as a response to the FBI-Randy Weaver standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992), and the FBI-Branch Davidian showdown in Waco, Texas (1993). Some groups include Christian Identity rhetoric in their conspiracy claims. In organization, these groups are most similar to a Posse chapter in that leaders advocate the formation of small paramilitary cells cloaked in secrecy and trained as guerrillas for what they anticipate will be the final showdown with the federal government.

Another aspect of the Patriot movement is the so-called common-law courts movement, which advocates using extant court systems to file bogus liens and claims and thereby wreak havoc in local communities. All deny the legal authority of federal and state governments and seek to create a new system of which they will be the leaders. Traveling teams of instructors hold meetings around the country to show others how to use common-law court tactics to subvert the American legal system. The Montana Freemen and the Republic of Texas used common-law methods against local, state, and federal governments. Many common-law advocates also file bogus claims against their fellow community residents, which creates localized tensions that have the potential to erupt into violence.

In June of 1984, a small cell of the extreme rightist group The Order shot Jewish talk show host Alan Berg to death outside his Denver, Colorado home. The man ultimately responsible for Berg's death, Robert Mathews, died later that year in a shootout with FBI officials on Whidbey Island, Washington. Mathews had spent most of his life affiliated with right-wing groups, and his beliefs became more extreme as he aged. He began his career as a white supremacist with the John Birch Society during the 1960s and learned survivalism from Arizona's Sons of Liberty. He experimented with tax-evasion societies, and finally came to embrace virulent white supremacist doctrine as a member of the West Virginia-headquartered National Alliance. His last affiliation was with Aryan Nations and The Order, which he founded and recruited from the Aryan Nations compound to fight for a territorial imperative that defined the northwestern United States as a homeland for the white race. When The Order targeted Alan Berg for assassination, they were, they believed, striking a blow for white freedom against an international Jewish conspiracy.

The Aryan warriors of modern paramilitary rightist groups are, they believe, engaged in a monumental Manichean struggle for the very soul of this nation. They seek to prepare—in remote, often rural, areas—for a final battle between the forces of good and evil. Intertwined with biblical prophecies about the return of Christ and the final showdown with Satan, the ideological foundations of many right-wing extremist groups emphasize a millenarian view of history, in which preparation for an impending "end-time" before a thousand years of peace is crucial. Hence the stockpiling, arsenal-building, and compound construction. The nostalgic quest for a mythical and idyllic agrarian past, the search for cultural homogeneity, and preparations for Armageddon are traits of the latest incarnations of rightist groups.

White supremacist warriors believe themselves to be the "last defense" for the white race, the cultural commandos who will lead the country successfully into the twenty-first century following their preordained triumphant battle against the evil forces of the apocalypse. Not unlike some nineteenth-century utopians, these groups' members and their sympathizers search for a new homeland to improve their own lives and initiate a new era. Their aspirations, however, go beyond constructing a personal utopia. In other words, they purport to know what's best for this country and for this world, though the only way to achieve a thousand years of relative peace is by segregating people according to race and ethnicity and minimizing contact among groups.

On Definitions

Defining "extremism" is a tricky matter, because it is a term that can apply to opposite ends of the political spectrum. John George and Laird Wilcox suggest that concepts of a "left wing" and a "right wing" became more clearly defined by the early twentieth century. Popular perceptions associated "right wing" with conservatism, patriotism, racism, nationalism, and religiosity. "Left wing" often implied liberalism, internationalism, collectivism, secularism, and egalitarianism.

"Left" and "right" extremist movements in America have often shared a political focus such as a working impatience with the normal channels for dissent that exist in democratic societies. They have often moved in similar directions, proposing isolationism or perhaps opposition to banking. One constant in attempting to tease out differences between extreme right and extreme left has been the perception of extreme rightist movements as those that rise primarily in reaction to the perceived displacement of power and status that can accompany social and political change, whereas leftist extremism has been perceived as something that impels social transformation by overthrowing old power and status groups.

George and Wilcox's definitions encompass broad tendencies that describe ideological differences between rightist and leftist extremists. We cannot measure to what degree a right-wing extremist subscribes to each of the tendencies, or which are more important than others in the rhetoric because different tendencies take precedence over others in response to national and local events, but most, if not all, of the tendencies exist in the groups' ideological packaging.

Sara Diamond further defines the "preoccupations of right-wing movements" as protecting free market or "libertarian" capitalism, promoting anticommunism, and preserving "traditional morality and supreme status for native-born white male Americans and for the nuclear family." Followers of rightist ideology, according to Diamond, wish to maintain race, class, and gender hierarchies in this country and, specifically, ensure the ultimate supremacy of white, Protestant men over women and men of color.

I should point out here that this study deals with the extreme right. Diamond, George, and Wilcox have tended to use "right-wing" more broadly than I do. As Lisa McGirr notes, terms like "radical right" and "extreme" have been applied incorrectly to conservative movements since the 1960s. To do so implies that all conservatives are "extremists" and thus makes it easy to dismiss anyone who claims conservative political or social leanings if one does not share those beliefs.

Conservatives, like liberals and the extreme wings of both ideological milieus, encompass people from all walks of life and backgrounds. Myriad movements exist in the broader context of "conservative and liberal" and extreme right or left. Therefore, I have chosen to use the terms "extreme right" or "extremist right" throughout this discussion in reference to the groups and individuals under analysis. Like McGirr, I have concluded that "extreme" is a word best left to "white supremacist, paramilitary, and fascist fringe groups like the Ku Klux Klan" whose members opt to work outside the democratic political process and who advocate violence to achieve their goals. Some of the groups I examine, like the Republic of Texas, are not overtly racist. Nonetheless, they are antigovernment and at least one chapter has resorted to violence in response to outside stimuli. Consequently, I will use "extreme" in reference to them as well.

I have defined extreme rightist ideology as a belief system that incorporates organized and/or violent reaction (which may or may not involve vigilantism) to an individual or group of individuals whose race, ethnicity, or religious, social, or political beliefs and practices differ from the perceived status quo in the place and time where rightist agitation occurs. I have also included one group—a chapter of the Republic of Texas—in this definition because its members advocated an extreme antigovernment stance that resulted in actual physical violence. As McGirr has also noted, reactions include working outside the normal political democratic process to achieve specific goals. It is a reaction against something that is perceived as "different" and hence a threat to general safety and morality.

Often, that targeted individual or group of individuals is in a numerical minority or a position of lesser social and political power and the rightist reaction develops because of a perceived threat to "how things are" or perhaps as a response to historic beliefs, as in the case of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. Rightist and extreme rightist ideology can operate on political levels, as in the form of political parties during the nineteenth century (and the so-called Populist Party of the 1980s and the current incarnation of neoconservatives in the Republican Party), or it can be expressed in secret societies that may or may not practice vigilantism.

It is also difficult to ascertain degrees of extremism within the boundaries of right-wing ideology. Some extreme rightist groups might support other extreme rightists in some situations but not in others. Some extreme rightist groups might believe that another extreme rightist group simply is not extreme enough or is a tool of the government. Still other extreme rightist groups splinter into separate factions that then mutate into either more or less extreme versions of the parent organization. I do not believe it is useful to develop a scale of "rightism" because, especially since the early 1990s, new groups have appeared and disappeared with remarkable speed on the American landscape that fills all corners of right-wing extremism. Indeed, many people have felt passionately about some social or political issue and espoused an opinion that others could construe as "extremist." But not everyone joins a group or encourages violence as a solution to national problems.

Therefore, in terms of my analysis and for ease of the reader's comprehension, I have chosen groups and individuals whose public rhetoric and literature clearly support white supremacy and/or violence against government officials, people of color, Jews, and gay men and lesbians. In addition, these groups and individuals clearly define themselves as locked in a struggle for control of America, and they choose to demonstrate their cause by joining or associating themselves with organized extreme right-wing groups or touting secessionist antigovernment rhetoric and stockpiling supplies for an impending "showdown" with the federal government and/or other murky antiwhite forces of the apocalypse.

These are groups and individuals who often live and work outside the mainstream and who always look over their shoulders for the long arm of the government they are certain will snatch them and herd them into secret concentration camps. Ruled by conspiracy theories, often paranoid, America's latest incarnation of the extreme right has tapped an old vein in this country's history.

The most extreme rightists advocate injuring and killing government officials, call for a whites-only homeland within the United States (usually somewhere in the West—particularly the Northwest), and support the banishment or deaths of people of color and Jews. In my analysis, the most extreme rightists preach and support violence and perpetrate violent acts to further their cause. The less extreme do not overtly support violence but might subscribe to it as an abstract concept—especially in terms of "Armageddon" or "Apocalypse," in which thousands of people are going to die violently in events that are beyond the control of mere humans.

To justify their views, white supremacists rely on biblical interpretations, racist tracts by members of both early and more recent rightist groups and individuals, and Christian Identity. Further entangled in the rightist web—whether extreme or not—are notions about "Americanism" and what it means to be "American." As I will argue throughout, also intertwined in American nationalism and broader extreme rightist sentiment and organization are ideas about what it means to be an American man and how American nationalism is not only gendered, but also racialized. In this country, white men overwhelmingly populate the images of manhood and masculinity that convey ideas about American character. Broad rightist sentiment and organization has quite a bit to do with a reaction to "difference." But it also has a lot to do with maintaining and expressing Protestant white male authority throughout this country's history in its more extreme manifestations.

Past Tense: Extremism, Vigilantism, and Fraternalism

The best-known right-wing extremist group—indeed, the longest-running—is the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, however, is not the first demonstration of right-wing sentiment nor are the ideas it has espoused since its first manifestation after the Civil War completely new. Perhaps the earliest documented rightist sentiment is anti-Catholicism, which emerged in Puritan America. Rampant in England before the first Pilgrims took leave of the Netherlands and the British Isles, anti-Catholicism sailed west with its hosts and took root in the burgeoning nationalism of a fledgling America threatened by rival Spanish and French imperial ambitions, both Catholic nations.

Although not necessarily a "crime" to be Catholic in Puritan America, proscription did occur, primarily through legislative action. Most established colonies were not unwilling to restrict church freedoms; limited sanctuary existed for those who subscribed to a so-called secretive and conspiratorial religion. For Puritans in the new Zion of Massachusetts Bay, life in the proverbial garden enjoyed favorable contrasts with the Roman Catholic "cesspool" of Europe. These Puritans sought to build a city upon a hill and fill it with the redeemed who chose to throw off the chains of Old World sinfulness. Catholicism provided images of hell, and these first Puritan settlers despised the Anglican Church because to them, it mirrored the Church of Rome.

By 1740 with the advent of the Great Awakening, Protestant fundamentalist fervor encouraged hatred of Rome and warned Americans of the deadly Catholic threat. Wars against France and Spain fanned rumors of a Catholic conspiracy and painted ominous pictures of Catholic forces amassing in Canada and Florida. During these years, nativism had firmly rooted itself in both religious and conventional wisdom.

The Revolutionary War proved a unifier for "true" Americans and the real test of liberty was whether someone supported the new government or the crown, not whether he or she practiced Catholicism. George Washington went so far as to quash so-called Pope Day festivals in 1775 because he needed Catholic men in the revolutionary army. Catholic France also proved a useful ally in the field against the British. In fact, if not for France's aid, England might have won the war. Even though hostility flared in Pennsylvania and upstate New York in response to Catholics still loyal to the English crown, the provocation was more in terms of loyalism than Catholicism.

Following the war, a greater spirit of tolerance infused the new republic. By 1790, President Washington told clerical and lay leaders of Maryland Catholicism that he expected America to become one of the foremost nations in advancing justice and freedom. He also called for American citizens to remember the patriotism of many Catholics during the fight against England.

His words, unfortunately, did not remove the strain of rightism that leaned toward the extreme that had arrived from the Old World. Three strands of extreme right-leaning ideology found expression by the mid-nineteenth century: anti-Catholicism, anti-radicalism (expressed as a fear of foreign radicals), and finally, what historian John Higham calls "racial nativism." This is what Higham terms "the concept that the United States belongs in some special sense to the Anglo Saxon 'race,'" which offered an interpretation of the source of national greatness. These ideas helped to form the foundations of modern extreme right organization and ideology, one of the loudest expressions exhibited in nineteenth-century "manifest destiny" and violent campaigns against Native Americans.

Organizations dedicated to eradicating certain groups and beliefs from America developed in force during the nineteenth century. These included the anti-Masonic movement, perhaps the first example in the United States of a preservationist antielitist mass movement; it evolved into a political party—one of several new parties offering to cleanse and protect the land from what its members perceived as "evil influences." They wished to "preserve" American values (that they themselves dictated) and were suspicious of elite groups such as the Masons because of their secretive nature.

The anti-Masonic party was active in national politics until 1832, a reaction to "secret" societies and the mysterious disappearance of a stonemason, William Morgan, who was allegedly murdered by Masons. He had been a Mason himself but was in the process of writing an exposé of the group. The anti-Masonic movement first formed as committees in response to Morgan's disappearance. Members of the anti-Masonic party declared that not only was Freemasonry a terrible evil in the country, but so, too, was Catholicism, a similar "secret society."

Another extreme right-leaning political party, the Native American Democratic Association, organized in 1835 after the anti-Masonic movement fizzled. The group argued about whether to focus on Catholics or immigrants as the evil threatening America and instead included both in its platform. They failed in their 1836 election bid, but several other groups formed in response to the rhetoric they espoused. The American Republican Party organized with the image of nativism as the tool to bring about reform on the political and social front. Founded in 1841 in New Orleans, the organization sported a network that stretched to New York by late 1843. Its platform was simple: office holding restricted to native-born white men, Bible-reading in public schools, an extended waiting period for naturalization, the abolishment of corruption from political offices, and the diminishment of foreign influences in the country. The party changed its name to Native American in 1845 but collapsed in 1847.

The next major nativist political force in the mid-nineteenth century was the Know Nothing Party, called thus because when questioned about it, members would say they "knew nothing"; newspaperman Horace Greeley coined the term in 1853. The group had begun as a secret society of white men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, but, as soon as the "Know Nothing" name gained widespread use, the society evolved into a political party whose members agreed to attack those who threatened American political liberty and principles.

Eventually capitalizing on Whig support, Know Nothing appeal swept over the elections of 1854. Manufacturers marketed Know Nothing candy, tea, and toothpicks and some buses and stagecoaches sported the coveted name. The elections of 1856, however, brought the defeat of the Know Nothings because of divisions among anti- and proslavery factions within its ranks, a reflection of sectional differences that stretched far beyond the boundaries of the party.

Nativism, racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism (more popular among twentieth-century extreme rightists) are unfortunately as old as white settlement in this country. Organized groups such as the Ku Klux Klan had plenty of vitriolic rhetoric and ideology upon which to build their own foundations; it was simply a matter of men stepping forward to organize more groups.

Extreme right-wing groups in this country share not only certain ideological penchants, but also other critical characteristics. Until the early twentieth century, the primary organizers and members of right-wing extremist groups and networks have been white Protestant men. The Ku Klux Klan formed a women's auxiliary during its 1920s incarnation, and some white women are active in Klan, neo-Nazi, and constitutionalist groups today, but their numbers are much lower than those of their male counterparts. Often, they join because of their associative relationships with male members. Most often, they are wives or girlfriends of active right-wing extremist men, and, as we shall see, the right has very rigid ideas about how women are to conduct themselves in the fight against the global conspiracy that threatens the white race.

The Ku Klux Klan and Vigilantism

The Ku Klux Klan (or KKK) first appeared in American history immediately after the Civil War. Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865, it consisted of six well-educated but unemployed Confederate veterans. They chose the name based on the Greek word for circle: kuklos. Its organizing principles rested on retaining and defending white supremacy from Northern interference and free African Americans. Beginning as a club of sorts for defeated Confederate soldiers, it quickly developed into a loosely knit, secret terrorist network in the Southern states.

By the late 1860s, the Klan had spread a reign of terror throughout Southern and former Confederate border states. Gangs of Klansmen threatened, tortured, and murdered countless people: black and white, women and men. The most common targets were black men and women and individuals involved in contesting or dismantling the foundations of white Southern supremacy. The Klan was particularly expert in using sexual violence and brutality. Klansmen routinely raped and sexually tortured women—especially black women—during household raids. They also tortured, lynched, and sexually mutilated black men and other opponents.

In her study of the the 1920s women's KKK (WKKK), Blee notes that "gender and sexuality were compelling symbols in the two largest waves of the [KKK], those of the 1860s and the 1920s." Each Klan called white Protestant men to protect white womanhood and white female purity. Both the 1860s and the 1920s Klan "dissolved a myriad of social, economic, and racial issues into powerful symbols of womanhood and sexual virtue." Klansmen of the 1860s insisted that white women benefited from the Southern racial state, without which they would be raped and brutalized by black men, who were considered no better than primitive animals.

White women became highly visible symbols through which the Klan could rouse public fears that blacks' retaliation against their former white masters would be exacted upon white mothers, daughters, and wives. The Klan spread the belief that white men were powerless to aid white women who faced frightful sexual violations by black men. Klan propaganda played on not only the fears of women, but also unspoken fears of men. To a Klansman, the abolition of slavery ended white men's sexual access to black women, and it also potentially ended white men's exclusive sexual access to white women.

Blee notes that the Klan's call to defend white women against rape by black men signified a relation of power not only between white men and women, but also between white men and black men. The Klan's emphasis on the threat of black men raping white women served as a warning to both black men and white women about interracial relationships, but underlying the obvious references to potential sexual violation was a deeper threat to white men's sexual privileges. When mobs of Klansmen sexually tortured and emasculated black men, they were, in a sense, validating their claim that masculinity ("real manhood") remained white men's exclusive prerogative. Blee argued that "southern women, white and black, occupied a symbolic terrain on which white men defended their racial privileges." Symbols of white female vulnerability and white masculine potency, Blee notes, "took power equally from beliefs in masculine and in white supremacy."

The 1920s Klan continued to rely on images of white Klansmen protecting white women, but its propaganda also emphasized white men as heads of households and families. Nancy MacLean points out that "rule over one's women was mandated by another staple of the Klan's conception of masculinity: 'honor'; or, as it was sometimes called, 'chivalry.'" MacLean's research demonstrates that "honor" dictated a commitment to protect the virtue of 'American' women. Historically, she states, "honor in fact rested on a man's ability to control the sexuality of his female relations. Their 'purity' was the complement of his 'honor'; hence the Klansmen's insistence on 'the chastity of woman.'"

Expressions of Klan masculinity in the 1920s, MacLean continues, relied more on images of benevolent protectorship than vigilante violence, though the latter was not uncommon. She linked this shift in portrayals to the changing social and political contexts in which the Klan operated. Increasing urbanization and, notably, women's involvement in social and political activism generated a change in how Klansmen attempted to maintain the surroundings they preferred, which encouraged women to stay at home, out of the workforce and politics, and also to keep white men as the pinnacle of an American social and political hierarchy.

Ironically, many 1920s Klansmen were not completely antagonistic to women's suffrage or the idea of women working outside the home. They recognized that white Protestant women must work with their men to achieve shared political and social goals. Nonetheless, "recognition of women by Klansmen was always shot through with ambivalence. . . . However much Klansmen might try to cooperate with women who shared their social goals, female initiative set them on edge; the undertow of patriarchal prerogative impeded full solidarity." This male ambivalence toward women's roles in social and political circles, as we shall see, remained with rightist groups throughout the twentieth century.

Marauding and violent gangs of nineteenth-century Klansmen conjure images of their contemporary western vigilante groups. Indeed, Klansmen operated as vigilantes in that they were citizens who banded together to combat a perceived threat to their social well-being. They justified their actions to themselves and to their supporters, but as Catherine McNicol Stock notes, "vigilantism in rural America was more often than not a brutal act of violence which, in its broadest manifestation, sought out men and women who threatened the safety and economic stability of their communities."

Throughout American history, Stock argues, vigilantes did pursue criminals, but they also "brought to justice" people whose beliefs and behaviors did not match those of the vigilantes. In the colonial era, vigilantes targeted people whose poverty or perceived laziness threatened the productivity of more established families. In the early nineteenth century, vigilantes targeted such groups as Mormons, who challenged the emerging doctrine of liberal individualism. During the industrial era, Chinese and Mexican people were the victims of vigilante "justice" and miners and lumberjacks were targets of violence when they attempted to unionize. More often than not, people of color, those of the working classes, or people perceived as "deviant" (e.g., Communist) have faced the wrath of vigilante mobs.

The earliest recorded instance of an organized vigilante group occurred in eighteenth-century South Carolina. In 1767, several men banded together to stave off groups of armed bandits who were terrorizing and robbing settlers in the unregulated frontier conditions. The vigilantes, known in the backcountry as the Regulators, employed various strategies to stamp out banditry. Their methods included burning cabins of known gang members and whipping suspected outlaws and their family members. The Regulators often opened fire without warning and killed runaway slaves if it was too much trouble to return them. After their zealous law enforcement, when most of the actual criminals had been rounded up, killed, or had fled, the Regulators continued preying on people who lived on the margins of communities but had never committed a crime. These poorer folk endured Regulator wrath because the latter saw poverty as a result of immorality and a potential threat to the entire community.

Eventually, a full-scale vigilante war developed because another group of citizens, tired of the Regulators, organized and called themselves Moderators. Fortunately, a battle of greater proportions was averted and the two groups called a truce in 1768. Vigilantism as a response to frontier destabilization, however, had only just begun. Between 1767 and 1902, Richard Maxwell Brown notes, more than 326 identifiable vigilante organizations perpetrated at least 729 murders.

In Western myth and also in actual western communities, Richard White points out that it was not uncommon for personal violence and crime to rise to levels that communities refused to tolerate and that appointed authorities could not control. In such instances, groups of citizens (usually male) would band together and "take the law into their own hands"; they claimed to operate outside the law in order to enforce the law itself. According to White, between 1849 and 1902, at least 210 vigilante movements occurred in the American West. In all, they killed 527 people, usually by hanging. The most lethal of these movements occurred in eastern and northern Montana in 1884. It claimed thirty-five victims.

Vigilantes often contended that the breakdown of constituted authority and the rising threat of criminals meant that an armed citizenry had to take control to preserve order. Certainly, some situations existed that justified such an account, but others straddled a far more ambiguous line. Invoking the doctrine of self-preservation and asserting that they were simply observing the right of the people to assume sovereignty when the government proved incapable of doing so (a fundamental doctrine of American republicanism), vigilantes set about overriding legal officials. Ironically, they would imitate said officials when they captured criminals, conducted formal (though illegal) trials of the accused, and meted out justice at the end of a noose. Some vigilante groups merely conducted raids and victimized their targets, without even the faÁade of a staged trial.

This was the sort of vigilantism in which Klansmen engaged, expressing their ideological leanings through white supremacist violence and self-righteous proclamations. It evolved from a small club into a network of chapters whose members participated in secret, elaborate rituals that required special terminology and costumes that served also to lure new recruits into the fold and impress onlookers. In these respects, the Klan operated as a fraternal order that men who desired to uphold white supremacy in the South could join.

Such male secret societies were common in the last third of the nineteenth century. In a total adult male population of roughly nineteen million in 1896, five-and-a-half million belonged to fraternal groups such as the Odd Fellows, the Freemasons, and the Knights of Pythias. Indeed, the framework of fraternal organizations has informed American extreme right-wing groups since the Know Nothings. A fraternity allows men to feel "part of something," offers support and resources to its members, and encourages a culture of manhood and rituals that further solidify the group. Nothing new in American history, the idea of "fraternity" provides another ingredient in the current white supremacist movement.

Rites of Passage: Fraternalism

Membership in fraternal organizations brought tangible benefits. Businessmen could make contacts, establish credit sources, and gain access to a national network of lodges. Younger, less-established men could socialize with their employers and perhaps make valuable contacts. Often, fraternal life insurance, death benefits, and even lodge charity provided strong inducements for men to join at a time when governmental assistance for any of these benefits was nonexistent. In terms of urbanization and industrialization in the latter half of the nineteenth century, sociological benefits could outweigh even the economic. In an anonymous and perhaps frightening urban environment, fraternal organizations provided cohesive social networks for the men who participated in them.

Mary Ann Clawson argues that fraternalism has been one of the most "widely available and persistently used forms of collective organization in European and American history from the Middle Ages onward." Fraternal organizations, by use of their images of masculinity and craftsmanship, worked to deny the significance of class difference and to offer gender and race as appropriate categories for the organization of collective identity. Still, orders existed (and continue to exist) that cater to a specific economic class. Clawson notes that some orders—especially non-Masonic—contained more working-class men than others.

Intrinsic to each lodge or organization were elaborate and involved rituals in which members were expected to participate. Often long and complex, nearly all fraternal rituals required at least an hour to perform, not including the successions of initiatory degrees, which required separate rituals in which only specified members participated. The initiation rituals bound the entrant not only to the members of a local lodge, but also to a symbolic union within the particular order.

Within the rituals and levels of membership of the lodge, the men involved created a highly stratified and hierarchical society in which they willingly participated. Perhaps the greater significance of these orders lies in the fact that millions of men belonged to them. I would argue further that a majority of these organizations limited themselves to white men. Prior to the late nineteenth century, this makes sense, in light of the fact that African American men were enslaved, Asian men were either legally excluded from the country or confined to the western part of the country, and Hispanic men tended to have their own groups. After the Civil War, the imposition of Jim Crow laws further alienated white men from African American men, ensuring that fraternal organizations tended to be race-exclusive. Regarding the rituals enacted in an organization, whether they took place within the confines of a Masonic lodge or around a burning cross, white male participants enacted them with religious fervor.

Fraternal orders also attempted to create a domestic sanctuary outside the home. They were the motherless, wifeless, womanless family in which late-nineteenth-century Victorian-era men could express themselves, ironically, in emotional and spiritual ways with other men without garnering labels such as "effeminate." The orders served perhaps as an alternative church for many men, who wished to escape the confines of evangelical Christianity in which many Protestant women were involved during the nineteenth century.

Evangelicals fought the influence of secret male societies almost since their inception during the early nineteenth century; indeed, the Freemason movement nearly collapsed during the 1820s and 1830s because of unorganized campaigns among evangelical women, who participated in the anti-Masonic movement during those years. Women spoke out against Freemasonry in church meetings and acted in concert to publish anti-Masonic resolutions. Many of these women argued that secret societies such as the Freemasons rendered men impious and led them down a path away from the true word of God, especially since so many of the orders met in pubs and other such places of vice.

The fraternal movement that developed in the mid-nineteenth century, however, had purged itself of alcohol and incorporated rituals that imitated somber religiosity. The orders offered religious guidance and a means for personal transformation, which posed a greater challenge to women who opposed male secret societies on the basis of their affront to Christianity. These reformed orders encroached upon women's role as Christian nurturer. Fraternal lodges, after all, excluded women. Members devised secrets and rituals and threatened each other with punishments if they revealed anything to their wives. Through their rituals, they reclaimed religious authority that had formerly resided in Biblical patriarchs.

During the nineteenth century, formal religion attracted droves of women and quickly became an area of female prerogative. This situation, in which men did not partake as readily in religion and often attended church as reluctant accompaniments of the women in their lives, afforded women unusual power—especially within their own families. By the late nineteenth century, therefore, middle-class men were not participating in religion and were, as one scholar argues, caught in a rising tide of male insecurity triggered by bureaucratization of white-collar professions and fathers' increasing absences from their homes. Urban middle-class culture allowed fewer and fewer opportunities for masculine self-determination and patriarchal control, signaling a reorientation of the meaning of masculinity. The alleged closing of the western frontier, the rise of pacifism, and declining opportunities for the "self-made man" in urban business worlds made the quest for manhood difficult.

Consequently, it seems no mystery why men sought some sort of stability in their pursuit of manhood within the protective confines of fraternal societies. Secrecy remained the best defense against opposition from women and organizations like the National Christian Association (NCA), but fraternal leaders developed new ways to allay oppositional fears. Editors of fraternal monthlies began to address female audiences by including "Ladies' Departments" that featured fashion accounts and recipes in addition to articles that explained how organizations such as the Freemasons accorded with the sentiments of evangelical women. In addition, leaders began to invite wives to attend lectures and banquets (over the strenuous objections of many members) and, most important, societies embarked upon a proposal to introduce women to lodges through the creation of women's auxiliaries.

Virtually no man wanted women to participate directly in the exclusive domain of male lodges or rituals, however. Many did see that extending an olive branch of sorts to women might alleviate their suspicions and leave men free to continue participating in their organizations. A leading Odd Fellow, Schuyler Colfax, broached the subject of instituting a Degree of Rebekah—a women's degree—to lessen the prejudice women felt against the Order. He also wrote the ritual for the Degree, which induced women into a defense of the Order. Furthermore, he claimed that few women had actually joined the anti-Masonic movement and instead many had actually supported the efforts of the lodges to exist.

By the 1860s and 1870s, most orders actually followed the lead of the Odd Fellows in devising some form of auxiliary group or ladies' degrees with the exception of the Masonic lodges, which did not officially recognize the Order of the Eastern Star (a women's auxiliary implemented in 1869), but individual Masons sponsored and supported the organization's activities. Indeed, many Masons were appalled by the deceit the Eastern Star's male supporters engendered in the rituals. Conferring such degrees on women, they argued, was calculated to mislead women. Such charges are ultimately true; the differences between women's degrees and the rituals of the male orders were vast, unbeknownst to female initiates at the time. Furthermore, a woman's status in the auxiliaries depended on her husband or father. Female membership in the Degree of Rebekah or the Order of the Eastern Star was limited to the wives and daughters of Scarlet Degree Odd Fellows or Master Masons and if the male relation were expelled from the order for any reason, the woman had to leave the auxiliary, and if a daughter of a member married a nonmember, she had to leave the group.

In addition, all orders banned women from men's initiation ceremonies. The original injunctions on secrecy had been designed explicitly to prevent women from learning about male rituals. The Noble Grand or Worshipful Master of the men's lodge, however, presided over meetings and initiations of the Degree of Rebekah (Daughters of Rebekah) and the Order of the Eastern Star, and men were required to attend the initiations of their female relations. Female officials of the Order of the Eastern Star were given no explanation for this practice when they inquired.

Ironically, fraternal orders managed to reclaim, to some extent, traditional gender roles for middle-class Protestants. Through their revamped organization away from taverns and drunken revelries, they instead promoted moral development. Through death benefits and insurance provisions, they guaranteed financial security for families, a role that men had traditionally fulfilled. And through flattery—especially as depicted in fraternal novels that appeared as serials in monthly magazines—orders assuaged women's fears about secret societies.

The novels' plots often revolved around a disruption of a family and described the calamities that befell its members in the world of men without the guidance of a mother's hand. Through feminine virtue, women protected the home from masculine aggression and materialism, but, fraternal writers warned, women wandering too far from their rightful domestic sphere faced terrible troubles and the loss of their intrinsic womanly assets. The traits that made the heroines of fraternal novels so appealing included beauty, passivity, and naiveté about the world of men. Endangered by unredeemed men, these true women needed the assistance and protection of male lodges and, by extension, their male participants.

Although many lodges implemented women's auxiliaries, women did not participate in any aspect of male ceremonies, whereas men did participate and preside over women's ceremonies. The women's degrees also affirmed the virtues of "true womanhood" and warned women away from encroaching on traditional male pursuits. Male lodge members designed and wrote the ceremonies for women's degrees, so the rituals lacked the dramatic flair of the men's rituals and instead relied on recitations of biblical parables. Women initiates simply affirmed their commitment to these ideals. The women's degrees lacked the dangerous journeys, heroic encounters, and stark representations of death so prevalent in men's rituals.

Despite the fact that deception and strict gender roles enabled the creation of women's auxiliaries, the groups became increasingly popular by the 1890s—approximately 500,000 women had joined them. Certainly, such organizations afforded women the ability to form female networks that stretched beyond the homefront, but they nevertheless remained under the control of their male associates. Women were excluded from the inner machinations of male lodges, but men were expected to attend and preside over women's ceremonies and women's membership hinged not on each other, but on male associations. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, therefore, fraternal societies managed to appropriate middle-class rhetoric of female domesticity and reform in order to reassert ultimate male dominance over both public and private affairs.

When the Ku Klux Klan first formed in 1867, the small group of men did not bill itself as a Protestants-only group. Members had to be white men, however, and they had to profess to uphold the doctrine of white supremacy. This earliest incarnation of the Klan incorporated aspects of both vigilantism (operating outside the law) and fraternalism, in which secret rituals and ceremonies worked not only to bond men to each other and to the cause itself, but also to terrorize the group's targeted enemies. Cross-burnings and night raids in white robes and hoods lent a frightening air of mystery and deadly danger to the Klan, on which it capitalized in its campaigns.

Although the Klan would eventually incorporate rabid anti-Catholicism into its ranks (especially in the twentieth-century incarnation), the nineteenth-century group created a culture with costumes and secret rituals that mimicked the symbolism and ritual of the male hierarchy within the Catholic Church. The Klan barred white women from membership, reflecting larger Southern politics, and the abuse and exclusion of African Americans reinforced an ethos of racial power and invulnerability among Klansmen while the exclusion of white women celebrated and solidified the masculinity of racial politics.

The idea of "white womanhood," however, served as a critical rallying point for the post-Civil War Klan and its violent campaigns. White women benefited from the Southern racial state, Klansmen insisted, because it protected their "virtue" from the lower, more primitive men of color who could not control their animal lusts in the presence of white women. Throughout the writings of the first Klan, the theme of imperiled white womanhood provided a continuous rhetoric of gender roles and true manhood, which was white. Without the Klan, white men were powerless to assist white women who faced potential rape at the hands of former slaves.

This feared assault on white women threatened white men's sexual prerogatives (through competition with African American men for white women) and symbolized the perceived Northern exploitation of the South during the era of Reconstruction. David Chalmers notes that white women stood at the core of Southern white male chivalry and sense of property. Inaccessible to African American men, white women presented the ultimate line of difference between white and black men.

Gender roles play a pivotal role in not only the Klan since the nineteenth century, but also the extremist right in general. Expectations about what men and women should do abound in right-wing rhetoric and continue to play an important role in how men operate within the groups and in their reasons for joining right-wing groups. The Klan's first appearance imitated western vigilante bands in the nineteenth century as well as the rituals and white male exclusivity of many contemporary fraternal societies. After the turn of the century and with the Klan's second major appearance in the United States, the group attempted to appeal to a wider white audience by implementing a women's auxiliary and encouraging a more "family-oriented" atmosphere through picnics and Sunday school sessions.

Klan Resurgence: Twentieth Century

Following World War I, America entered a period of social and economic flux. Urban migration and the expansion of business opened markets for new products. Madison Avenue touted modern conveniences available to most anyone, as options such as credit developed in the 1920s. Mass production allowed many Americans to purchase things like automobiles, which in turn expanded markets for highways and other automobile-oriented facilities such as hotels and motels. The service economy entered high gear during the 1920s. Women finally won the right to vote, and suddenly generations of youth discovered life away from nuclear families and farms as a shifting economy opened urban service and factory jobs.

Times like these, which involve rapid social and economic change, are ripe for right-wing movements and groups because rightist ideology rests on the premise that change is "bad" and to cure social ills, it is best to return to "traditional" values—that is, a social hierarchy that places white men at the apex. Typically spouting ideology of nostalgia and warnings of a dire future because of the social changes that come with rapid economic expansion, right-wing organizations attempt to reassert white hegemony by hearkening back to what their members see as the "good old days."

The Klan gained prominence again in the wake of World War I, riding a wave of revisionist sympathy for the Confederacy and a profound sense of discontent and anxiety among many American residents. The Klan in the 1920s was not primarily a Southern terrorist organization. It branched out and preached a mutifaceted program based on "100 percent Americanism" (native-born white Protestant Americans) and militant Protestantism, and it enlisted recruits in every section of the country. Histories of the Klan argue back and forth over the past seventy years about the type of members the group attracted and whether it was predominantly a rural or urban phenomenon.

The Klan became a movement that transcended rural, and often class, boundaries in pursuit of local and national issues. In other words, Klansmen found commonalities across these lines in pursuit of 100 percent Americanism. Because of differences in local issues, the Klan expanded its bashing repertoire to include Catholics (because of their perceived loyalty to the pope rather than the United States), "subversives" such as communists (in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Red Scare in 1919), and "intellectuals" (because of their association with movements such as communism and socialism) in addition to obvious targets like people of color.

This twentieth-century incarnation of the Klan would have repercussions throughout the century. No longer was the Klan an isolated Southern phenomenon organized in response to a specific event (Reconstruction). Rather, as its 1920s development demonstrates, it tapped into deeper white Protestant concerns that had continued to simmer within the melting pot of American history—remnants of Puritan millennialism and beliefs in Manifest Destiny.

With the end of the war, the United States had entered the messy realm of world politics. The Great War was, in a sense, this country's coming of age. Improvements in industries and transportation—planes, trains, and automobiles—linked Americans internally and to the rest of the globe. City populations swelled with natives and immigrants alike, seeking part of the American dream. Corporations expanded, consumers consumed, science and medicine increased research, and a frenetic sense of discovery jockeyed for expression with a nostalgic longing for a mythic, simpler past.

Arnold Rice argues that the decade 1920-1930 suffered from the effects of World War I in profound ways. First, during the war, antialien and, by extension, anticommunist campaigns created an atmosphere of hostility and tension between Americans who considered themselves "native born" versus new immigrants. Second, Rice claims that racial antipathies increased because of the migration of African Americans to northern cities in search of better-paying war industry jobs. In addition, African American men who served as soldiers in the armed forces brought their experiences abroad back to the States—including ideas about liberation. Consequently, groups like the Klan capitalized on the feelings some whites had about so-called "uppity Negroes." And third, the old American evangelicalism seemed to disappear in the wake of modernism and the expansion of consumer markets.

Regardless of how postwar turbulence and the rise of a culture of prosperity interacted to spawn the first twentieth-century Klan, historians generally agree that this manifestation found great support among both disaffected rural and prosperous urban Anglo Protestants. Although overall Klan ideology and goals may have been generally the same, Klan members themselves came from an array of social and educational backgrounds and were undoubtedly drawn to the organization for a variety of reasons. Like many local political organizations, Klan chapters expressed regional differences and concerned themselves with localized, as well as national, issues.

Virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant as well as anti-African American, the 1920s Klan couched its policies toward its perceived enemies in a rhetoric that extolled Christianity, the Constitution, and the duties and responsibilities of the white race to uphold both. The Klan made its reappearance in 1915 under the direction of William Simmons, an Alabama-born Methodist pastor enamored with fraternal organizations (he was a member of several, including the Masons), which no doubt played into his interest in the Klan. Not much is known about Simmons, who was tight-lipped about his past. He had served in the Spanish-American War, but had not advanced to the rank of "Colonel," which is what his Southern friends called him. Simmons himself was tall and lanky, capable of "fire-breathing" preaching in a deep voice, which no doubt lent itself to bringing supporters into his fold. He himself was apparently the son of a man who had been an officer in the Confederacy, so he always dreamed of re-forming the Klan.

Two events occurred in 1915 that fed the fire to reorganize a group like the Klan. D. W. Griffith released his film, Birth of a Nation, which garnered national attention and glorified the Confederacy during the Civil War (and painted African Americans as monsters) and Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager, was convicted in Atlanta after he was accused of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old white girl. Evidence pointed to a janitor at the factory, but such did not save Frank from a death sentence. After the conviction, more evidence came to light further exonerating Frank. The judge commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, but a lynch mob intervened and carried out the death sentence.

Because of intense media coverage, Frank's case garnered widespread attention. When Simmons restarted the Klan on Thanksgiving of that year, he did so in an atmosphere that seemed supportive of such activities, given the sensationalism surrounding Griffith's film and Frank's death. At Stone Mountain, Georgia, Simmons and sixteen hooded men re-formed the Klan. It was at this meeting that cross-burning was officially introduced into the Klan's repertoire. Simmons formally declared himself "Imperial Wizard" of the "Knights of the Ku Klux Klan," and he apparently got no argument. Under his leadership, which was absolute, Simmons directed the Klan until the early 1920s.

The phenomenal success of the 1920s Klan had to do with its differences from its earlier predecessors and the context in which it formed. It drew its membership from small business owners, professionals, merchants, skilled laborers, and land-owning farmers. In other words, it went after the middle-class, which joined in large numbers (between 3 and 6 million) in such states as Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Oregon. Simmons himself enjoyed only limited success in his first five years, and in 1920 he hired professional organizers. Edward Y. Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler launched a recruitment effort that belied anything Simmons had been able to conduct. Clarke and Tyler deliberately targeted extant fraternal organizations like the Masons for recruits. They were quite successful. In addition, free publicity as a result of Congressional hearings and sensational articles published by the New York World made many Americans aware of the group and its goals. By the early 1920s, Klan ranks could boast more than a million members. Clarke, a former journalist and fraternity organizer, had been promoting a festival in Atlanta when he met Tyler, who was handling publicity for the "Better Babies" hygiene movement. The two formed a business—the Southern Publicity Association—and their clients included the Anti-Saloon League, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. In June of 1920, Simmons met with them in hopes of giving his group the boost it needed.

Simmons signed a contract with Clarke and Tyler that granted the publicists a phenomenal eight dollars of every ten-dollar initiation fee. Clarke billed himself as imperial kleagle, head of the Propagation Department and within a few years, the two publicists had met with incredible success. They felt that Simmons was only reaching out to a small market with his appeals for men to join a mystical society that dedicated itself to protecting Southern "order," patriotism, and racial superiority. Instead, Clarke and Tyler turned the Klan into a traditional nativist crusade that assailed all nonwhites and Catholics and the links between "foreigners" and the Catholic Church. With this new advertising campaign and an organized approach to recruitment that involved dividing the country into target areas, Clarke and Tyler brought in more than a million men within the first three years of the 1920s.

The Klan's incredibly rapid growth resulted from the sale, literally, of mystical fraternalism, as well as the traditional attraction of nativism. Clarke, Tyler, and Simmons also developed elaborate costumes (robes and hoods, among other paraphernalia) that created a market for the manufacture of such items. In addition, they created a publishing company to print Klan magazines and newspapers. Overall, however, the romance of a secret society proved a huge draw for men just as it had in the nineteenth century; Clarke and Tyler's managerial expertise merely capitalized on extant sentiments in a postwar, consumer-driven society.

In 1922, a coup of sorts occurred in Klan ranks. Dissatisfied with the direction the Klan was taking, Texas dentist Hiram W. Evans wrested control from Simmons, who had been ill for some time. Evans named himself new Imperial Wizard and began foisting the Klan onto the national scene, involving itself in local and national politics. Evans went after organized labor (which he viewed as terribly leftist) as well as big business, which he viewed as "anti-worker." He also reached out to women, but with a caveat. Women should participate in the Klan to "restore" traditional values to America, but they should not participate in politics or the workforce.

Evans also touted what he passed as "American" values, but he blatantly stated that white supremacy was the answer to the country's ills. "In the future as in the past—the hope and destiny of the nation rests in white supremacy." To Evans, white supremacy would "preserve the doctrines of popular liberty which lie at the foundation of our government, these ideals which are enshrined in the republic and our free institutions."

Often declaring themselves in favor of stringent law enforcement—particularly pertinent in this age of Prohibition-generated crime—the Klan appealed to white Protestant men in search of answers to the chaos they saw around them every day. The Grand Dragon of Colorado's Klan, for example, claimed that the Klan had "a responsibility and an obligation hitherto without precedent in the history of our country," indeed, "an obligation written with an unseen hand, deep in the heart of every individual klansman [sic]." Calling upon the American patriotic spirit, the Grand Dragon invoked it by stating that a Klansman should be devoted to "his God, his country, his home, and his fellow men.

Mantled in these traditional symbols of Protestantism, the 1920s Klan posed as bearers and saviors of what Robert Goldberg dubs "old time religion." The Klan promised to unite Protestants in a moral crusade that would combat the purported evils of evolution, restore faith in God, the Bible, and Christian fundamentals. Large donations to Protestant churches and heavy recruitment of ministers maintained the veneer of religiosity that accompanied the Klan during the 1920s while cries for law and order appealed to more secular-oriented individuals. Klansmen also vigorously attacked the "moral laxity" sweeping the country: new styles of clothing, sexually suggestive dances, and tantalizing motion pictures were sapping America's strength and encouraging a general social and moral decay. Many Klansmen vowed to work diligently at not only banishing "loose women," roadhouses, and heavy petting joyriders, but also at restoring decorum and decency in their communities.

By 1925, the Klan boasted more than a million members nationwide, with strongholds in Indiana, Oregon, Texas, and Colorado. The Klan also held enormous influence over local governments in those states as well as others, including Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Ultimately, the 1920s Klan may have been a victim of its own success. As it expanded nationwide, it became more difficult for Evans to maintain control over individual chapters and chapter alliances in other states. Infighting between Evans and his underlings helped fracture the Klan, and a series of scandals in the organization brought it extremely bad press.

The worst of those may have been the rape and subsequent death of a woman named Marge Oberholtzer. Oberholtzer worked in an Indiana program to combat illiteracy in the 1920s. In 1925, she was kidnapped and repeatedly raped and brutalized by Indiana Klan Grand Dragon David C. Stephenson, who was also the money behind such political figures as Indiana's governor, Ed Jackson. Oberholtzer survived the attack but attempted to kill herself afterward while still Stephenson's hostage. He foiled her first attempts, but her third (mercuric chloride poisoning) left her vomiting blood, so Stephenson had some of his supporters drive her to Indianapolis, ostensibly for medical treatment. On her deathbed, she fingered Stephenson as the attacker. A doctor who examined her noted that the wounds the Klansman had inflicted on her made it appear as if she had been attacked by a "pack of wolves."

Stephenson was arrested and convicted of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison but was granted clemency in 1950. Arrested again for a parole violation, he was freed in 1956 and moved to Tennessee, where he died in 1966. This incident spelled the end of the Klan in Indiana during the 1920s, and the ripple effect created such bad press that other Klan chapters began to fold. Moreover, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, Americans' concerns had shifted to the everyday battle for economic survival rather than Klan activities.

The Klan lost members in droves during the Great Depression. Nonetheless, the advent of the Civil Rights era during the late 1940s and into the 1950s would see its reformation and reestablishment in a renewed push for white supremacy. Just prior to World War II, three strains of American right-wing extremism took root. From these roots sprouted the many branches of the profligate extreme right so apparent since the 1980s.

Beyond the Klan

In 1933, an embryonic neo-Nazi group modeled after Hitler's Brown Shirts formed under the auspices of William Dudley Pelley. He called his group the Silver Legion, though they are better known as the Silver Shirts. Pelley had been a writer and journalist for magazines during the late 1910s and early 1920s. He had worked for the Associated Press in Russia during the 1917 Revolution, and his experiences in that country colored his views about Soviet peoples to the extent that he was alarmed at the possibility of the rise of a workers' state, which he was certain would lead to American bolshevism.

Pelley turned to writing romantic novels and movie scripts, but in 1927 he retreated to the California mountains and apparently underwent a mystical religious rebirth in which he claimed to have made contact with the occult and heard voices from other worlds. He also began leaning toward apocalypticism, writing about a "time of troubles" that would lead to the redemption of the human race. Pelley claimed that Christ would return during his lifetime, and he took to reporting various sightings. By 1931 he was claiming that the worst reincarnated demon souls lived in Jewish bodies, through which they were wreaking chaos on the nation. These demons also controlled President Herbert Hoover—the same demons who had engineered the Great Depression.

Two years later, Pelley founded his Silver Legion, which openly supported Hitler, cooperated with the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, and launched a vicious anti-Semitic campaign. Members had to be at least eighteen and were required to wear a specified uniform (consisting of a service hat, blue corduroy trousers, leggings, a tie, and a silver shirt upon which a letter "L" was stitched on the left breast). They were also expected to participate in elaborate hierarchies.

In 1940, Pelley claimed to have 25,000 members, but membership had actually declined before that. Most of the Legion's activities centered in a few urban areas: Minneapolis, San Diego, Los Angles, Seattle, Chicago, and the industrial areas outside Cleveland. In 1942, President Roosevelt charged Pelley and others with violating the Espionage Act because they had distributed information aimed at subversion of the United States armed forces. The prosecution inflated Pelley's influence, though his defense was weak. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Pelley ended up a martyr for the right as a result of the attention he had received at his trial.

A second strand of right-wing extremism unraveled on the Kansas plains. Gerald B. Winrod, a Protestant fundamentalist minister preached to a large and militant following across the Midwest. Through the pages of the Defender (his popular publication), he propounded the virtues of Nazism and fascism and the patriotic groundwork of both, along with anti-Semitic myths. Unlike Pelley, Winrod claimed that his anti-Semitism was rooted in Biblical prophecy. Winrod had been preaching since the age of twelve, following his mother's miraculous recovery from terminal cancer. The great masses of Jews, he claimed, were unaware of the sordid Jewish plot to rule the world; nevertheless, the Jewish elite, he argued, was responsible for the trial and execution of Jesus as well as the persecution of early Christians under the Roman Empire. The early Jewish elders composed the Talmud, according to Winrod, which was the precursor to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the text that "proves" an international Jewish conspiracy.

Winrod placed the myth of the international Jewish conspiracy at the center of a revived Protestant fundamentalism that embraced the Ku Klux Klan. Winrod preached fundamentalism and combined it with politics to run as a Republican for the Kansas State Senate in 1938. He finished third, with strong support from Mennonites and former Klan counties. In 1942, he met a fate similar to Pelley's. The Roosevelt administration charged Winrod with sedition in its attempt to undo the nativist right.

The third strand of modern rightist extremism developed with Gerald L. K. Smith, who is the most important link between the fascism of the 1930s and the white resistance groups that sprang up during the 1970s. Smith's roots were in Wisconsin, where he began a career as a fundamentalist minister at age eighteen. In 1933, he was among the first to join Pelley's Silver Shirts. He eventually ended up in Shreveport, Louisiana, preaching at the First Christian Church. Ideologically, themes in his preaching shifted from storm-trooping to rural radicalism; he eventually left the church to work for Huey Long, the flamboyant and larger-than-life governor of Louisiana elected to the U.S. Senate in 1930. Smith served Long as an organizer for the "Share Our Wealth" campaign and earned a reputation as a rabble-rouser and a fiery speaker.

After Long's assassination in 1935, Smith made an unsuccessful bid for power in Louisiana. He then attempted to develop a national third party with Frances Townsend, a physician who wanted to provide a pension plan for the elderly, and Father Charles Coughlin, the nationally known radio personality who became a virulent anti-Semite. The collaboration bore fruit with the Union Party, which ran William Lemke unsuccessfully against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.

Following Lemke's defeat, the Union Party crumbled beneath the egos of Smith and Coughlin. Smith moved to New York after the election and created the Committee of One Million, dedicated to combating the evils of the New Deal and communism. Unsuccessful in New York, Smith moved to Detroit, where he met Henry Ford, though the full extent of the pair's relationship remains historically unclear. Nevertheless, Ford fueled Smith's belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy by supplying him with copies of the Dearborn Independent's series on the International Jew.

In the late 1930s, Smith sought the Republican nomination for the United States Senate in Michigan but was soundly defeated. During World War II, he was a strong isolationist and staunchly pro-German; he continually denounced Roosevelt and the New Deal and attempted to involve himself in every presidential campaign he could after the war. A friend of Wesley Swift, Smith came to embrace Christian Identity by World War II, further solidifying his anti-Semitic views and conspiracy-ridden beliefs. Smith lived until the late 1970s, certain that an international Jewish conspiracy would bring about the eventual downfall of the United States and possibly the world.

Throughout his life, Smith insinuated himself into mainstream politics at the highest levels. Ever the orator, Smith also turned his hand to writing, churning out forerunners of today's direct-mail fundraising letters and espousing nativism, elements of populism, and nationalism. He remained politically active most of his life. In the end, Smith and his supporters provide a bridge from past to present. From Smith's anti-Semitic preachings and Christian Identity leanings, modern white revolutionaries such as the new Klan (since ca. 1970), Aryan Nations, and the Posse Comitatus have emerged and coalesced into a widespread grassroots social and political movement that has tapped into such American traditions as nativism, xenophobia, and racism. None of this is new. What is new is the proliferation of such groups since the late 1980s.

In Chapter 2, I will set the stage for the links between white supremacist doctrines and older traditions of American constructions of nation and nationality. I will historically contextualize Manifest Destiny and how the doctrine of American expansionism echoes through the extremist right.

In Chapter 3, I will discuss the Hayden Lake, Idaho-based Aryan Nations since its origins in 1973 and Robert "Bob" Mathews' terrorist spin-off, The Order. I will examine how Aryan Nations leader Richard Girnt Butler came to establish the compound (once known worldwide for its summer "Aryan World Congresses"), how its members performed "masculinity" as "Aryan warriors," and how earlier ideas about American westward expansion and the "frontier" play into modern expressions of white supremacist ideology.

With regard to The Order, I will provide a brief biography of Mathews, how he ended up in Washington state, and how he attempted to develop a so-called White American Bastion, or white homeland, in the Pacific Northwest. Tantamount to this discussion is the rise of "survivalist" culture since the Vietnam War and how some white men have been trying to fight and win Vietnam in other arenas—e.g., through the pages of novels, through movies like Rambo (1983) and magazines like Soldier of Fortune, by participating in paint ball "wars," and, in some cases, by joining white supremacist groups.

In Chapter 4, I will set the stage for the Posse Comitatus and provide a background to rural protest movements and Populism in the American West and Midwest. I will also sketch the historical and social circumstances that surrounded the farm crisis of the 1980s, which spurred the growth of some extreme right groups. I will address the history of the American agrarian myth and its role in rural America before and after the farm crisis. I will trace the development of the Posse Comitatus with specific emphasis on the Midwest and West. The Posse Comitatus, as a rurally based movement, used the farm crisis as a means to recruit farmers in desperate straits into its ranks across the West and Midwest. Not only did the Posse propagandize the importance of farmers to the moral and social fabric of America (thus falling back onto images of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer bringing settlement to the wilderness), it also relied on vigilantism (or the threat of it) in an attempt to empower its members in its war against the federal government. As an example of one man's war against ZOG, I will discuss Gordon Kahl, a farmer and Posse member who died in a 1983 shootout with federal law enforcement officials.

In Chapter 5, I will trace the development of the 1990s "Patriot" and accompanying militia movement as a response to the 1992 standoff on Idaho's Ruby Ridge between Randy Weaver and the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The movement also grew as a result of the deaths that occurred when David Koresh's Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, burned to the ground in 1993 during a standoff with FBI and ATF officials. I will examine how "Patriot" groups preach vigilantism and rely on a culture of masculinity that emphasizes the paramilitary warrior to recruit members and build cohesive fighting units.

The two examples I will examine involve the 1996 and 1997 standoffs that involved the Montana Freemen and the Republic of Texas, respectively. I will discuss how the government changed its tactics to deal with right-wing extremists and what effects that had on the local communities and extreme rightists as a whole.

Ultimately, I hope to convey that the white supremacist movement is something that is not as much on the "fringe" as we would like to believe. Its ideology has evolved from earlier ideas about American nationalism, "character," and a sense of "mission" that defined westward expansion during the nineteenth century. These ideas about what it means to be an American and especially an American man continue to resonate in current political debates about "family" and "traditional values."

America's loss in Vietnam also played a crucial role in the formation of white supremacist groups since 1970. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a culture of survivalism developed as a means—especially for men—to fight battles (paint ball) or prepare for them (stockpiling, paramilitary militia training). This survivalist culture, as James Gibson notes, seems to be a response to America's loss in Vietnam and a way for men to prove somehow that they are men by going to battle. Since the military fell into so much disfavor after Vietnam, some American men have sought to create other battles and other training grounds in order to enact a rite of passage that perhaps their fathers and grandfathers had—military service and/or going to war.

Other American men seek their battles—their "frontiers" to conquer—within the ranks of white supremacist groups. Here, they can be the cowboys and the warriors that serve as the archetypes of American culture and character. They can learn how to protect their heritage, their race, and their women. Here, in essence, they can learn how to be men.