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the second half of the 1970s, as did rural gangs of paramilitary survivalists. But none drew the publicity generated by the Ku Klux Klan, which became the symbol of white supremacist resurgence.

11
Enclave Nationalism and The Order
    September 4, 1983. For the sixth time since founding the National Alliance, William Pierce gathered its members to a convention in Arlington, Virginia. They came from across the country for a chance to rub shoulders with Dr. Pierce, as he was always deferentially called, and to make new friends. Pierce used the occasions to cull the ranks for individuals he thought had leadership potential and to continue a process of instilling a new method of recruitment, personal solicitation. In years previously, most new members had joined through contact with the national office in Arlington. Now Pierce wanted his geographically dispersed cadres to advertise the organization, find qualified membership prospects, and sign them up. 1 To help inspire others along this path, Pierce selected Bob Mathews to speak about his work with Louis Beam in the Northwest distributing N.O.F.I.T. newsletters.
    Mathews’s speech blended the general approach taken by white supremacists toward (white) family farmers with the specific analysis the National Alliance made of its own vanguard role. Farmers were faced with losing their livelihood and their “whole life,” he reasoned, “mostly from the Jew usury system.” Since farmers were prime racial stock, “living monument[s] to masculinity,” he said, National Alliance members had special responsibilities. As “members of the vanguard of an Aryan resurgence,” he argued, they must “radicalize American yeomanry and bring them into our vanguard for victory.” And Mathews described a specific example of such a farmer he had met while distributing newsletters.
    Notice the specific wording here. He did not argue for a plan of building the farmers’ own autonomous organizations. Neither did he call for a broad propaganda campaign against “Jews” and “usury.” Instead, heurged the “radicalization” of farmers, which meant spotting those who already exhibited anti-Semitism and imparting to them a sharply defined ideology, then recruiting them into the National Alliance “vanguard.” Mathews’s formulation was akin to Lenin’s when he organized the Bolsheviks: those workers who were the most militant and angry at the czar and the bosses should be given an education about the capitalist system and recruited into the Communist Party.
    Mathews’s convention speech revealed dual loyalties. On one hand, he leaned heavily on Pierce’s ideological underpinnings when discussing propaganda and recruitment to the “vanguard.” And he believed that only the National Alliance could lead their white revolution. 2 His belief was almost religious in nature. “Through the Alliance lies the salvation of our entire race,” he said.
    On the other hand, Mathews’s talk also reflected the months he had spent with Beam. The erstwhile Klansman had “shown us the way,” 3 he claimed. He emulated Beam’s hot rhetorical style as well, including an invocation to “stand up like men and drive the enemy into the sea.” For Pierce, violent destruction of the enemy was a necessary, but future, task. Beam’s call to arms, by contrast, was immediate.
    Mathews also exhibited two minds when thinking about white people. In his right brain, he had bitter contempt. “I was thoroughly disgusted with the American people,” he wrote; “our people have devolved into some of the most cowardly, sheepish, degenerates that have ever littered the face of the planet.” 4 In his left brain, he was willing, even eager to give his life for a semimystical future for white children. 5 Just a few weeks after the convention, Mathews made up his mind. He decisively chose one direction only, from which there was no escape.
    William Pierce called it the Aryan Resistance Movement. Robert Miles called it