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.[4]
At the time of Pierce's death in 2002, the National Alliance was bringing in more than $1 million a year, with more than 1,500 members and a paid national staff of 17 full-time officials. After Pierce's death, it entered a period of internal conflict and decline.
William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia.[3] The son of William Luther Pierce Jr. and Marguerite Farrell, his Presbyterian family was of Scotch-Irish and English descent. Pierce's younger brother, Flournoy Sanders, an engineer, assisted Pierce in his political activities.[5]
Pierce performed well in school; his last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas.[10] As a teenager, his hobbies and interests were model rockets, chemistry, radios, electronics, and reading science fiction.[8]
After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He was injured when a four-inch (10 cm) pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman.[12] Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics.[13][14] He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, initially at Caltech during 1955–56.[13][15] At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962.[3][14] He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.[16]
Early political activities
His tenure as assistant professor at Oregon State University coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and later the counterculture.[17] The former, along with the protests against the Vietnam War, he regarded as being led by Jews.[15] In 1965 to finance his political ambitions, Pierce left his tenure at Oregon State University and relocated to North Haven, Connecticut, to work as a senior researcher at the Advanced Materials Research and Development Laboratory of aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.[11]
After a brief membership in the anti-communist John Birch Society in 1962, he resigned because the Society was uninvolved in race issues.[10][18] After he moved to Washington, D.C. he became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. During this time he was the editor of the party's quarterly ideological journal, National Socialist World.[15][18] When Rockwell was murdered in 1967, Pierce became one of the leading members of the National Socialist White People's Party, the successor to the ANP.
In 1968, Pierce left the NSWPP and joined Youth for Wallace, an organization supporting the bid for the presidency of George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama.[13] In 1970, along with Willis Carto he reconfigured Youth for Wallace into the National Youth Alliance. However, a complex dispute between the two men had begun by the late 1960s. By 1971, Pierce and Carto were openly feuding with the latter accusing the former of the theft of the Liberty Lobby mailing list. These issues caused the NYA to split, and by 1974 Pierce's wing became known as the National Alliance.[19][14] Among the founding members of the board of the National Alliance was a University of Illinois professor of classics, Revilo P. Oliver, who was to have major impact of Pierce's life both as an adviser and friend.[20]
The National Alliance was organized in 1974. Pierce intended the organization to be a political vanguard that would ultimately bring about a white nationalist overthrow of the United States Federal Government. Pierce spent the rest of his life living in West Virginia. From this location, he hosted a weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices from 1991,[15] the internal newsletter National Alliance Bulletin (formerly called Action), and oversaw his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), Free Speech and Resistance, as well as books published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. (many of which promoted Holocaust denial) and the "white power" record company, Resistance Records, which Pierce supported from its inception around 1993 and purchased outright in 1999.[4] On the topic of the Holocaust, he claimed the number of deaths had been exaggerated, and that many of the details had been fabricated.[21][better source needed]
In 1978, claiming the National Alliance was an educational organization, Pierce applied for and was denied, tax exemption by the Internal Revenue Service.[14] Pierce appealed, but an appellate court upheld the IRS decision.[14] Around the same time, he was interviewed by Herbert Poinsett on Race and Reason, a public-access television cable TV talk show co-hosted by former KlansmanTom Metzger.[22]
An anti-Zionist, he attempted during the Yom Kippur War to force McDonnell Douglas into canceling military contracts that sent armaments to Israel by buying shares of the company's stock and putting forward the motion at the national shareholder's meeting. The company rejected the motion and continued supplying Israel with weapons. Some of Pierce's later speeches on American Dissident Voices concerning the Arab–Israeli conflict were reprinted in Muslim publications and on websites, including that of the Lebanese ShiaIslamist group Hezbollah.[23]
In 1985, Pierce moved his operations from Arlington County, Virginia, to a 346-acre (1.40 km2) location in Mill Point, West Virginia, which he paid for with $95,000 in cash. At this location, he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church.[14] In 1986, the church applied again, this time successfully, for federal, state, and local tax exemptions. It lost its state tax exemption for all but 60 acres, which had to be exclusively used for religious purposes.[24] The other 286 acres (1.16 km2) parcel was used for both the National Alliance headquarters and the National Vanguard Books business and warehouse, and was denied state tax exemption.[citation needed]
In 1990, the documentary series Different Drummer produced a portrait of Pierce, which was aired on PBS.[25] He later participated twice on a public-access television cable TV live talk show hosted by Ron Doggett, Race and Reality and aired from Richmond, Virginia.[26][27]
Pierce was frequently described as a neo-Nazi,[3][13][14][23][17][28][29] although he personally rejected this label.[30] When confronted with the issue by Mike Wallace on 60 minutes, Pierce described the term as a slander:
I admire many things that Hitler wrote, many of the programs and policies that he instituted in Germany, but we do not blindly copy anyone else's policies or programs. We've formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today.[30]
In 1998, Pierce was a contributor to a documentary produced by the Discovery Channel about white nationalism in the United States.[31] As the leader of the National Alliance, Pierce established contacts with other nationalist groups in Europe, including the National Democratic Party of Germany, the British National Party (BNP), and the Greek Golden Dawn party.[14] He also had ties to BNP leader John Tyndall[3] Pierce's other recruiting efforts included a 51-minute[23] informational video titled America is a Changing Country,[32] and forming an anti-globalization group – the Anti-Globalization Action Network – to protest at the G8 summit in Canada in June 2002.[23]
Pierce's last public speech was made in Cleveland, Ohio on April 28, 2002.[33] On July 23, 2002, he died of renal failure, three weeks after being diagnosed with cancer that had spread through his body.[34]
At the time, the National Alliance was bringing in more than $1 million a year, with more than 1,500 members and a paid national staff of 17 full-time officials, and was better known than at any time in its history, after which it entered a period of internal conflict and decline.[citation needed]
Pierce gained attention following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who was said to be inspired by The Turner Diaries (1978), the novel written by Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.[14][2][35] 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" (especially Jews and those in interracial marriages or relationships) in the public streets of Los Angeles, followed by the systematic ethnic cleansing of the city, and eventually the entire world. This violence and killing is called "terrible yet absolutely necessary". 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 (a reorganized SS).
The part most relevant to the McVeigh case is in an early chapter, when the book's main character is placed in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters.[14] Some have pointed out similarities between the bombing in the book and the actual bombing in Oklahoma City that damaged the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found in his car, with several phrases highlighted, including "But the real value of all of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties" and "We can still find them and kill them."[36][37]
The Turner Diaries also inspired a group of white revolutionary nationalists in the early 1980s who called themselves the Silent Brotherhood, or sometimes simply The Order.[14] The Order was an offshoot of the Aryan Nations. They were tired of being merely "armchair revolutionaries". The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting and bank robbery, and supposedly gave money to the Alliance.[14] The Order's leader, Robert Jay Mathews, died in a stand-off with police and federal agents on Whidbey Island, Washington when police fired flares into his hideout, igniting a fire. Other Order members including David Lane were captured and sent to federal prisons. In 1996 Pierce sold the rights to The Turner Diaries to the Jewish publisher Lyle Stuart.[38]
On May 19, 1996, Pierce was interviewed on 60 Minutes,[30][39] during which Pierce was asked by Mike Wallace if he approved of the Oklahoma City bombing, and he replied "No. No, I don't. I've said that over and over again, that I do not approve of the Oklahoma City bombing because the United States is not yet in a revolutionary situation."[30] A year earlier in a telephone interview with The Washington Post, he was quoted as saying: "the Oklahoma City bombing didn't make sense politically. Terrorism only makes sense if it can be sustained over a period of time. One day there will be real, organized terrorism done according to plan, aimed at bringing down the government."[40]
In 1989, again under the Andrew Macdonald pen name, 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.[41] 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".[42]
Pierce was married five times. His first marriage was to Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They were married in 1957 and had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960. Kelvin was an aerospace engineer, while Erik is a computer scientist.[5] According to Kelvin Pierce, his father had been emotionally and physically abusive.[43] In 2020, Kelvin coauthored Sins of My Father: Growing Up with America's Most Dangerous White Supremacist, which chronicled his experiences with his father.[44]
William Luther Pierce's marriage with Patricia Jones ended in divorce in 1982.[45] The same year, Pierce married Elizabeth Prostel whom he met in the National Alliance office in Arlington. The marriage ended in 1985 and Pierce moved his headquarters to southern West Virginia.[14] Preferring immigrant women from Eastern Europe,[13] in 1986 Pierce married a Hungarian woman named Olga Skerlecz. She is a relative of Iván Skerlecz, Governor of Croatia-Slavonia; the marriage lasted until 1990. Olga moved to California after their divorce.[45] Pierce then married another Hungarian woman named Zsuzsannah in early 1991. They met through an advertisement that Pierce placed in a Hungarian women's magazine aimed at arranging international marriages. Leaving him in the summer of 1996, Zsuzsannah moved to Florida. His last marriage in 1997, which lasted until his death, was to another Hungarian woman, Irena, toward whom he was reportedly "sharp and condescending" and who had been miserable living with him.[13]
In 1993, Pierce wrote the script of the comic book New World Order Comix #1: The Saga of White Will!! which was illustrated by Daniel "Rip" Roush and colored by William White Williams.[46]
^ ab"The Turner Diaries". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved September 10, 2019. Days before he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding 500 others, McVeigh mailed a letter to his sister warning that 'something big is going to happen,' followed by a second envelope with clippings from The Turner Diaries.
^ abcdeReed, Christopher (July 25, 2002). "William Pierce". The Guardian. London. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
^ abcdefghijklmn"Extremism in America: William Pierce". Anti-Defamation League. Archived from the original on January 16, 2013. As founder of the National Alliance, the largest and most active neo-Nazi organization in the United States, Pierce used several media [outlets] ... to promote his vision of a whites-only homeland and a government free of 'non-Aryan influence.'
^ abcdSutherland, John (May 22, 1997). "Higher Man". London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 10. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
^"Pierce, William L". Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Modern Political Biography. Oxon Helicon Publishing Limited. 2004. p. 604. ISBN978-1-85986-273-5.
^ abJohnston, David Cay (July 24, 2002). "William Pierce, 69, Neo-Nazi Leader, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved March 16, 2021. Throughout nearly 40 years as a promoter of white supremacy, Dr. Pierce argued on his radio program, in his newspaper and in books that just whites should live in the United States, because 'white people must have living space exclusive to ourselves if the white race is to survive.'
^Beirich, Heidi (November 30, 2008). "Willis Carto: The First Major Biography". Intelligence Report. No. Winter 2008. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
^ abGettleman, Jeffrey (July 24, 2002). "William L. Pierce, 68; Ex-Rocket Scientist Became White Supremacist". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 24, 2018. William L. Pierce, a rocket scientist turned neo-Nazi writer who used a mix of intellect and hate to rise to the top of the American white supremacist movement and become the 'godfather' of skinheads, died Tuesday in his West Virginia compound.
^Berger, J.M. (September 16, 2016). "Alt History". The Atlantic. Retrieved December 24, 2018.
