American Nazi Party (ANP)

SIGNIFICANCE: The American Nazi Party was the most notorious white supremacist organization during the first half of the turbulent 1960s. George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of this small group, attracted considerable public attention by engaging in vicious verbal attacks on Jewish people and African Americans. After his murder in 1967, his message continued to inspire white nationalist politicians such as David Duke and small neo-Nazi groups of working class white urban youths from Detroit to Los Angeles.

The person responsible for organizing a Nazi movement in the United States after World War II was George Lincoln Rockwell, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War. Rockwell was born March 9, 1918, in Bloomington, Illinois, and received an education. During his Korean War service, he became interested in anti-Semitism and, according to his autobiography, he was entranced by Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf.

In 1958, Rockwell founded the National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination, with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. In March, 1959, he renamed the organization the American Nazi Party and adopted the swastika and the Nazi flag as its symbols. The party never received much financial aid from supporters and had constant financial difficulties. Minor party branches appeared in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Spotsylvania, Virginia. In 1962, Rockwell traveled to England to organize the World Union of National Socialists. However, as late as 1967, the party probably had no more than two hundred regular members. When Rockwell ran for governor of Virginia in 1965, he won only 1.2 percent of the total vote (6,300 votes).

Radical Racism

Even though his party was small, Rockwell attracted considerable public attention because of his radical racism. Like Hitler, he attacked both Jewish people and Non-Whites, and he called for white supremacy. The American Nazi Party blamed Jews for communism and race mixing. Rockwell also encouraged ties with the Christian Identity movement, an anti-Semitic organization founded in Britain in the 1920s that argues that God created only Christian Whites. To demonstrate the depth of his hatred of Jews, he used a Jewish altar cloth as doormat to the party’s headquarters, and he named his Doberman dog “gas oven,” a reference to the Nazi extermination system at the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Germany.

Rockwell also directed his attacks toward African Americans who were attempting to desegregate the South. Rockwell painted the phrase “White man fight! Smash the black revolution” on the side of his house. In his autobiography, This Time the World, he attacked African American men’s sexuality. He praised Hitler’s goal of leading a White man’s struggle against “racial suicide.” On the other hand, Rockwell praised Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, for advocating African American separatism. Rockwell called the Muslim leader the “Hitler of the black men.” Only after Rockwell discovered that the Nation of Islam’s goals included gaining control over several Southern states did he advocate the return of all African Americans to Africa.

Shock Tactics

Rockwell used shock tactics to draw attention to his small group. In July 1960, he caused a riot on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., by appearing in Nazi regalia. In May 1961, he decided to antagonize both African Americans and Jewish people in the South by sending a Volkswagen “hate bus” to New Orleans. He planned to picket both the local headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the premiere of the film Exodus. However, the American Nazis who picketed the theater were threatened by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who lived in New Orleans. The local police intervened and arrested the American Nazis, but not before Rockwell had obtained considerable free publicity. Even after Rockwell’s death, the American Nazis continued to use this shock tactic. In 1976–1977, the Chicago leader of the National Socialist Party of America, Frank Collins, threatened to march in the suburb of Skokie, where a considerable number of Holocaust survivors lived.

Legacy

Rockwell was a good organizer. He led outrageous demonstrations, but he also addressed college audiences to disseminate his views. After he was murdered in l967 by a former American Nazi, John Patler, the party changed its name to National Socialist White People’s Party. By the l990s, the neo-Nazi movement had split into at least twenty-three organizations. Major racist groups range from Richard Butler’s Aryan Nation in Idaho to Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance in California. Of the estimated twenty-five thousand dedicated militant White supremacists, perhaps one thousand are Nazis. However, the message has not changed. The various groups continue to demand White supremacy and target African Americans and Jewish people. Some White lower-class youths in Detroit, Michigan, and Los Angeles are seen as using Nazi rhetoric to compensate for their own failures in a changing society. In Louisiana, David Duke was initially inspired by Rockwell when he demonstrated against attorney William Kunstler in 1970 while wearing a Nazi armband. William Pierce, a former associate of Rockwell, wrote The Turner Diaries, which allegedly inspired a number of militant militia movements.

Rockwell did not invent the White supremacist movement in the United States, but he became a symbol to future neo-Nazis. The difficulty for many researchers is in explaining Rockwell’s movement without giving him undue post-mortem publicity. Many major college textbooks on U.S. history ignore him completely. Certainly written coverage of his views gives exposure to American Nazism. For example, the small American Nazi Party in Chicago was ignored until a September 1976 article in the Chicago Sun Times made the Nazis visible to the city’s population. However, others argue that ignoring the origin and the nature of the type of racist thinking that led to the Holocaust may be even more dangerous.

The American Nazi Party saw a resurgence beginning in the latter part of the 2010s. This was most vividly illustrated by its organization of a "Unite the Right" rally which transpired in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Both neo-Nazi and right-wing extremist groups participated in the event. Tragedy resulted from the event as a white supremist named James Alex Fields struck and killed Heather Heyer with his vehicle. Heyer was a counter-protester who had arrived at Charlottesville to demonstrate against Nazi and other extremist groups. The event achieved further notoriety as President Donald Trump described the event as being attended by "very fine people on both sides." Identified Nazi sympathizers were also present at the January 6, 2021, riot which overran the US Capitol building. One such individual was Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who was formerly a US Army Reservist and a security guard at the US Navy Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey. Besides his arrest, conviction, and jail sentence because of January 6, Hale-Cusanelli had achieved notoriety because of an online picture of himself posing as Hitler. In the photo, Hale-Cusanelli had his moustache trimmed to resemble that of the former German dictator. 

Following the outbreak of hostilities between the country of Israel and the terror group Hamas, beginning in October 7, 2023, antisemitic activities in the United States saw a corresponding spike. In the summer of 2024, the Anti-Defamation League Center documented 64 White supremacist events that occurred in 25 states between May 27 and September 2, 2024. These included paramilitary-style marches, demonstrations, and disruption of public events.

Bibliography

Bell, Leland V. In Hitler’s Shadow: The Anatomy of American Nazism. Kennikat, 1973.

Clark, Charles S. "An American Nazi's Rise and Fall." American History, vol. 40, no. 6, 2006, pp. 60–66.

Downs, Donald Alexander. Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community, and the First Amendment. U of Notre Dame P, 1985.

Dreisbach, Tom. "Trump’s Bedminster Club Hosted an Alleged Nazi Sympathizer Who Stormed the Capitol." NPR, 12 Sept. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/09/12/nx-s1-5107435/trump-capitol-riot-antisemitic-bedminster. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.

Elliot, Debbie. "The Charlottesville Rally 5 Years Later: ‘It’s What You’re Still Trying to Forget’." NPR, 12 Aug. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/08/12/1116942725/the-charlottesville-rally-5-years-later-its-what-youre-still-trying-to-forget. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.

Ezekiel, Raphael S. The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen. Viking, 1995.

Langer, Elinor. “The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today.” Nation, vol. 16, no. 23, July 1990. pp. 82–108.

Powell, Lawrence N. “When Hate Came to Town: New Orleans’ Jews and George Lincoln Rockwell.” American Jewish History, vol. 85, no. 4, 1997, pp. 393–419.

Schwartz, Alan M., ed. Hate Groups in America: A Record of Bigotry and Violence. Anti-Defamation League, 1988.

"Summer of Hate: White Supremacist Activity from Memorial to Labor Day." American Defamation League Center on Extremism, 9 Sept. 2024, www.adl.org/resources/article/summer-hate-white-supremacist-activity-memorial-labor-day. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.