William Luther Pierce

William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was an American neo-Nazi political activist. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he was author of the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The first novel inspired multiple hate crimes, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce founded the white nationalist National Alliance, an organization which he led for almost 30 years.

William Luther Pierce
Pierce in 2001
Born	William Luther Pierce III (1933-09-11)September 11, 1933 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Died	July 23, 2002(2002-07-23) (aged 68) Mill Point, West Virginia, U.S.
Other names	Andrew Macdonald
Education	Allen Military Academy
Alma mater	Rice University (BA) University of Colorado at Boulder (MSc, PhD)
Occupation	Professor of Physics at Oregon State University
Organization	National Alliance
Notable work	The Turner Diaries (1978) Hunter (1989)
Movement	Neo-Nazism, white nationalism
Children	2
Signature

Born in Atlanta, Pierce received a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University in 1955 as well as a doctorate from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1962. He became an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University in that year. In 1965, he left his tenure at Oregon State University and became a senior researcher for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. He moved to the Washington, D.C. area and became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was assassinated in 1967. Pierce became co-leader of the National Youth Alliance, which split in 1974, with Pierce founding the National Alliance.

Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries (1978) depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a world war and the extermination of non-white races. Another novel by Pierce, Hunter (1989) portrays the actions of a lone-wolf white supremacist assassin. In 1985, Pierce relocated the headquarters of the National Alliance to Hillsboro, West Virginia, where he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church to receive tax exemption for his organization. Pierce spent the rest of his life in West Virginia hosting a weekly show, American Dissident Voices, publishing the internal newsletter National Alliance Bulletin (formerly titled Action), and overseeing his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), Free Speech and Resistance, as well as books which were published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. and the white power music label Resistance Records.

Early life and education

Pierce in a high school military academy uniform

William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11, 1933.^[1][2] He was the eldest son of Marguerite Ferrell, a journalist, and William Luther Pierce II, an insurance salesman.^[3][4] His great-grandfather was the governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederate States of America.^[5] His family moved to Norfolk, Virginia with his father's insurance business when Pierce was four years old.^[3] His younger brother, Sanders "Sandy" Pierce, also engaged in racist politics.^[6]

His father was killed in a car accident involving a teenaged driver on January 30, 1943.^[2][7][8] Following his father's death, Pierce attended public schools in West Virginia until he and his mother moved to Montgomery, Alabama. His last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, where he did well academically.^[7] Pierce later said that as a teen he had been "sort of a nerdy kid without social skills", awkward around women and with few friends.^[1] His teenage hobbies and interests were chemistry, electronics, and reading science fiction, particularly the pulp magazine Planet Stories.^[1]

Pierce earned a full scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston in 1951.^[7] He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a time, then studied at the California Institute of Technology.^[9] At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962.^[1][4] His doctorate thesis was on "Electric Quadrupole Saturation of Zeeman Levels in Gas" and he studied under the physicist W. H. Tantila.^[10] In 1957, Pierce married Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960.^[11][1][12] Pierce regularly physically abused his children. In 2020, Kelvin coauthored Sins of My Father, which chronicled his experiences with his father, and his rejection of his views.^[12]

Physics career

After getting his doctorate, Pierce taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.^[7] The only organization he belonged to at this time was the American Physical Society.^[10] A contemporary article from The Oregonian said of his time teaching at OSU that there was "much respect for Pierce, but not much love", particularly among his students. He was regarded as a very hard worker who never took breaks.^[10] His assistant reported that he was unpopular owing to a difficulty with getting along with him.^[10]

His later decision to leave his job for unpaid work writing neo-Nazi literature baffled his OSU coworker David B. Nicodemus, though some of his students and an assistant were not surprised, saying he was fixated on Adolf Hitler and had read Mein Kampf in its original German.^[10] He directed a United States Air Force grant of $35,000 on semiconductors.^[10] Pierce left this job in June 1965 to become a senior researcher for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. In his field he was generally successful.^[10][13][14]

Politics

Pierce's tenure as assistant professor at Oregon State University coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement and later the counterculture.^[1][7] During his education, Pierce paid little attention to the wider world; he claimed that he had initially been sympathetic to the idea of black civil rights, but was suspicious of integration as damaging freedom of association.^[15] He was inflamed by what he viewed as a media bias against segregationists; when some of his colleagues blamed this on Jews, he became more interested in racial matters, and became increasingly militant in his thoughts on race.^[16] He blamed Jews for the civil rights movement, along with the protests against the Vietnam War.^[17]

Beginning in 1962, he was a member of the anti-communist John Birch Society, and this at the time appealed to him. He resigned the next year, viewing the Birchers as "too passive" on racial topics. He saw the anti-communism as a distraction from the true issue, race, and expressed his disappointment that they were opposed to the civil rights movement, but "weren’t willing to deal with it on a racial basis".^[14][18][19]

American Nazi Party

In 1963, Pierce saw on television a clip of protests against George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party (ANP); intrigued by Rockwell, he struck up a correspondence with him.^[16] According to Rockwell, Pierce mailed him complaining Rockwell had some things right thinking too small, to which Rockwell said Pierce should do something himself.^[10] He moved to Connecticut to work as a defense contractor in 1965, and began visiting Rockwell's base in Washington, D.C., also reading alarmist books about race at the Yale University Library.^[16] He and Rockwell became increasingly close, and at the same time Pierce was granted government clearance through his job. He was not openly racist with his coworkers; when the ANP was investigated, his coworkers described him as a "first-class physicist", but also "impenetrable", and said they had an "intense dislike of him as a person".^[16] After only a few months of work, his performance worsened and he quit Pratt & Whitney abruptly after less than a year of employment, claiming he had been writing hours a day for months and wished to be a writer.^[20]

He was the best educated associate of Rockwell, as well as the party's most enthusiastic promoter of violent action, believing that a National Socialist revolution required violence. Despite this he did not participate in the group's street actions.^[21] Pierce advocated Nordic superiority within the movement and said the leaders of the group should only come from "pure Germanic stock".^[21] He disliked and insulted ANP member John Patler on account of his ethnically Greek background, as did high ranking ANP member Matt Koehl. When, as a result of Patler's influence, Rockwell argued for a broader definition of the white race (including Slavs and Mediterraneans as white), Pierce and Koehl abhorred the idea and resisted, resulting in a schism in the partly leadership, though Rockwell eventually prevailed.^[22]

Pierce's activities within the ANP were mostly centered around writing and publication of ANP materials.^[23] In 1966, Pierce became the editor of the World Union of National Socialists quarterly ideological journal, National Socialist World, for which he split the production costs with Rockwell.^[18][24][25] The publication was stylized like an academic quarterly and aimed at an academic racist audience.^[10] He was a close advisor to Rockwell and functioned as the ANP's "house intellectual".^[18][24][25] Pierce, interested in "racial esotericism", was largely responsible for the popularization of the works of Savitri Devi among the neo-Nazi and white nationalist movement.^[23] Pierce advised Rockwell on power and media tactics, largely responsible for Rockwell's publicity success with the 1966 Chicago "White Power" marches.^[21] Rockwell proposed a business partnership with Pierce, an "Extremist Speakers Bureau", offering a 20% commission on bookings for Pierce, who would be responsible for finding speakers. This never materialized.^[26] Pierce and Rockwell were largely in agreement; they shared a similar worldview and goals, but they also sometimes had disputes.^[27]

National Socialist White People's Party

Pierce did not actually join the ANP proper until it was renamed to the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP) in January 1967.^[28] Rockwell was murdered by Patler later that year.^[26] There was some speculation, though it was never proven, that Pierce had something to do with it. However, Patler was ultimately convicted.^[27] Some ANP members argued there was a conspiracy and Koehl, Pierce, and a man named Robert Allison Lloyd had orchestrated Rockwell's murder.^[29] The day before the murder, Rockwell got into an argument with the three of them. One eyewitness claimed that he locked them out of their offices and said he would expel them. Rockwell's secretary and mistress Barbara von Goetz became convinced that the three of them had ordered Rockwell's killing and framed Patler to seize control of the party; Francis Joseph Smith, Rockwell's personal bodyguard, investigated on his own and concluded that the three of them had orchestrated Rockwell's murder.^[30] Afterwards Pierce stayed in the NSWPP, under the leadership of Koehl, becoming one of its primary leaders.^[31]

Pierce was at the time the chief voice for violent action in the party, out of the faction within it that desired revolutionary action.^[32] Pierce attempted to organize university students to the cause and promoted a philosophy of "total revolution", bringing in young militant neo-Nazis into the party.^[24][31] The other key member of this faction was James Mason, the author of Siege, who Pierce helped recruit into the party as a teenager in 1968.^[33] Another was a teenage adherent, Joseph Tommasi.^[32] Pierce held Tommasi in high esteem for his militancy.^[34] In March 1969, a NSWPP phone line operated by Tommasi that played a prerecorded message by Pierce which advocated murdering Black people was shut down. Another Pierce message advocated murdering U.S. Senators.^[35] That same year, born of their ideological commonality, Pierce and Tommasi launched the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) as a youth wing of the NSWPP, aiming for it to appeal to White college students.^[36] In 1968, he suggested to James Mason, a teenage associate of the party and later the writer of Siege, that he move to the party's headquarters in lieu of murdering his school administration. Mason credited Pierce's intervention with saving both his life and other lives.^[37] Pierce became a prominent influence on Mason's life.^[28]

Pierce affiliated with several different movements and became prominent as an organizer and leader of the white nationalist movement. Pierce felt the NSWPP's continual display of explicit Nazi regalia hurt their recruitment, and as a result fell out with the rest of Rockwell's successors. The "total revolution" philosophy annoyed Koehl.^[24][31] He, Koehl, and Lloyd led the party into the 1970s.^[38] However, he did not think Koehl was a proper leader, so he asked for Koehl to formally share power with the other two of them. This evolved into a power struggle when Koehl, offended, retaliated; Pierce lost, and ultimately left in July 1970.^[28][39] He wrote a letter criticizing Koehl in the aftermath, declaring he would not be surprised if the party devolved into being "a sort of Matt Koehl Nazi Fan Club".^[28]

National Alliance

Main article: National Alliance (United States)

Pierce at a 1999 National Alliance meeting in Hillsboro, West Virginia

After leaving the NSWPP, Pierce became an advisor to Willis Carto's National Youth Alliance.^[40] He created Youth for Wallace, an organization supporting the bid for the presidency of George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama. Alongside Willis Carto, Youth for Wallace became the recruiting organization for the National Youth Alliance. The group was plagued by large amounts of infighting. Carto and Pierce had a falling out and the group split, leaving Pierce in control of the majority.^[39][41][40]

In 1974, the National Youth Alliance was restructured and renamed as the National Alliance.^[41] Pierce intended the organization to be a political vanguard that would ultimately bring about a white nationalist overthrow of the United States Federal Government.^[17] The National Alliance was the most significant neo-Nazi group to come out of the NSWPP, and also the largest.^[42]

Pierce spent the rest of his life living in West Virginia. From this location, he hosted a weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices from 1991.^[17] They also distributed the National Vanguard periodical and maintained a website.^[39] Pierce rarely talked to the media, believing them to be dominated by Jews.^[4] While in West Virginia, the National Alliance was monitored by authorities, but mostly left to their own devices. The FBI investigated Pierce, with their file on him growing to hundreds of pages long. Unlike many white supremacist leaders of the period, Pierce was never convicted of any crime.^[13][31]

Pierce divorced his wife Patricia Jones in 1982. His rationale for the split was that it was "necessary in order for me to have the peace of mind I need to do most effectively what I must do with my life".^[19][12] In 1983, Pierce married Elizabeth Prostel, which lasted until 1985.^[19] He also had ties to British National Party leader John Tyndall.^[4] In 2000, he was profiled in a biography entitled The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds by academic Robert S. Griffin.^[43][44]

Novels

First edition cover of Pierce's The Turner Diaries, illustrated by Dennis Nix

Pierce published two novels under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.^[45]

The Turner Diaries

Main article: The Turner Diaries

In 1978, Pierce published The Turner Diaries, which became one of the most popular works of racist literature and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.^[42] It had started as a serial in the NA periodical Attack! in 1975.^[31] The book is a graphically violent depiction of a future race war in the United States, which includes a detailed description of the "Day of the Rope" mass hangings of many "race traitors", followed by the systematic ethnic cleansing of the city, and eventually the entire world. The story is told through the perspective of Earl Turner, an active member of the white revolutionary underground resistance, called The Organization, led by the secret inner circle known as The Order.

Pierce and the book gained attention following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who was inspired by the book.^[42][46] McVeigh used a very similar method to the book's main character, who is placed in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters with a fertilizer truck bomb.^[47] When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found with him, with several phrases highlighted.^[48] Pierce's stated opinion on the bombing varied; at one time Pierce denounced the bombing as it had not been at the right time. At other times, he said he did approve of the bombing.^[49] The Turner Diaries also inspired a group of white revolutionary nationalists in the early 1980s called The Order, after The Order in the novel. The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting, bank robbery, and murder.^[47]

Hunter

Main article: Hunter (Pierce novel)

In 1989, Pierce published another novel, Hunter, which tells the story of a man named Oscar Yeager, a veteran of the Vietnam War who begins by killing multiple interracial couples. He then assassinates liberal journalists, politicians and bureaucrats in the D.C. area. In interviews, Pierce called Hunter more realistic, and described his rationale for writing it as taking the reader through "an educational process".^[50][51]

Views

Pierce's views were centered around race, which he defined physically, culturally and spiritually; he believed that whites were the evolutionary peak of the human species and that they were being plotted against by Jews.^[52] He viewed other racial groups as not always inevitable enemies, with the exception of Jews, who he believed would inevitably conflict with white people.^[52] Pierce was frequently described as a neo-Nazi,^[4][53] although he personally rejected this label.^[54] When confronted with the issue by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Pierce described the term as a slander, saying that though he "admire[d] many things that Hitler wrote", the National Alliance had "formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today".^[54]

Pierce was opposed to individualism and largely viewed politics as a manifestation of group dynamics, criticizing modern American society as atomized and selfish. He accused individualists such as Ayn Rand, who was ethnically Jewish, as plotting against whites by promoting individualism to them.^[52] Pierce's goal was to convince the white population through propaganda, leading ultimately to a violent race revolution; he promoted his views through several mediums.^[19] Particularly important to his political views was World War II, perceived by Pierce as the most important event in modern Western history. He saw it as the triumph of democracy over fascism, which he believed to be the detriment of future generations, and led to the 1960s counterculture. He believed the counterculture was a kulturkampf designed to destroy Western civilization.^[55]

Pierce was publicly critical of most contemporary right-wing terrorism, particularly lone wolf terrorism, though not for moral reasons. He agreed ideologically with the perpetrators of most right-wing lone wolf terrorism of the period, but thought it was ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. He accepted that "civilians are going to be killed", but said the current time was incorrect for it and it lacked "a plan that can be reasonably argued will get you what you want to achieve".^[56] Despite these statements, Pierce dedicated his second book, Hunter, to lone wolf terrorist Joseph Paul Franklin, and became associated with the strategy of leaderless resistance; he also had several followers who committed acts of lone-wolf terrorism.^[57] His approach to terrorism was, according to scholar George Michael, "a gradual approach to terrorism with a preparatory stage which emphasized propaganda and organization".^[58]

Among Pierce's claimed inspirations for the development of his views were Dietrich Eckart's Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, August Kubizek's The Young Hitler I Knew, Savitri Devi's The Lightning and the Sun. From Nietzsche he was particularly taken by the idea of being a master of one's own life and the points of power of the will. In Eckart's essay he found an ideological backing for his antisemitism, while he incorporated Devi's racist mysticism from Lightning and the Sun into his ideology.^[7] Also influential on the development of his political thought were the works of American white supremacists Francis Parker Yockey, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant.^[18] He was also influenced by white nationalist writer William Gayley Simpson; Pierce published his book, Which Way Western Man? in 1978.^[59] According to his son Kelvin, he had asked Pierce why he had chosen white supremacy over all else, to which Pierce responded that it "was the only responsible thing I could do".^[12]

In the 1970s, Pierce created a religious philosophy he called cosmotheism. Cosmotheism synergized mystical and scientific ideas. It combined Darwinian ideas with ancient Germanic legends.^[19][60] The faith was atheistic and did not believe in a particular god.^[4] It emphasizes evolutionary development, and portrays the future as a linear evolutionary path related to race.^[61] In 2001, Pierce officiated the Cosmotheist wedding ceremony of Billy Roper, then a top staffer at the National Alliance.^[62] Cosmotheism was highly esoteric in its beliefs, which led to it having little influence on neo-Nazis outside of the National Alliance.^[11] It was influenced somewhat by Savitri Devi's thought.^[23]

Death

In early 2002 Pierce was diagnosed with cancer.^[11] Pierce died of kidney failure at his Hillsboro, West Virginia compound on July 23, 2002.^[11][13] Shortly before his death, Pierce selected Erich Gliebe as his successor; Gliebe was the manager of Resistance Records.^[63][11]

Pierce's final public speech came April 20, 2002, (Hitler's birthday). In this speech he criticized the rest of the White Power movement and other neo-Nazi groups, and promoted the cause of the National Alliance; this speech was divisive among white supremacists. This, in combination with in-group disputes and poor leadership, led to the National Alliance becoming far less significant after Pierce's death than it was under his leadership.^[11]