Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news : Hate Groups Have Moved to Greener Pastures

Here’s some cultural news, maybe happy or maybe sad. I suspect that most of us will see it as the former and not the latter. And that positive reaction, perhaps, is part of the good news itself.

Anyway, here it is: many of the old-time Southern California boogers have left our midst. Gone, amscray. They seem to have slipped out in the night, without our noticing, to take root elsewhere. What boogers, you ask? A good question, since we have all types in our locale, many of which remain very much with us, alive and wiggling.

These particular boogers were the huge assortment of racist, right-wing outfits that once populated Southern California like barkers at the circus. Southern California was famous for them. If someone decided they hated all Micronesians, or people with harelips or anyone who stepped on the cracks in the sidewalk, they would gather their disciples here and begin to spread the word. They flourished and grew strong, or at least they survived. And we had them all.

I remember once, about 25 years ago, driving toward Los Angeles through the Southwest desert. It was the blackest night. On the radio a Father Coughlin-like character was giving his listeners the business from a station in Glendale. Can’t remember his name but he had that staccato, machine-gun delivery that was high fashion among radio evangelists of the time, pumping out the line on commies and sin and the United Nations. Every 10 minutes or so he would pause to give his post office box to which we could send for literature, absolutely free.

It felt like I was driving to L.A. on a homing beacon. If I tired of the Father Coughlin type, I could move the dial and pick up three or four more. They were working the night, predecessors of the talk-show crowd, and every one of them beamed their signals out of L.A.

We also had the John Birchers, the Christian Identity people and the Aryan Nations, among others. For many years, the Southern California Birchers amounted to the largest and most active chapter in the country. In fact, the first disclosure of the Birch Society’s activities and even the fact that it existed--formerly it had operated as a secret society, much like the Ku Klux Klan--was made by the Santa Barbara News Press, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its work.

“If there was anything resembling communism or fascism in America,” the commentator R.L. Duffus observed in 1945, “Southern California would be the first to have it.”

But curiously, no more. The Birch Society closed its San Marino office in 1989 and the staff moved to Appleton, Wisc. Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance pooped out in Fallbrook. The Church of Jesus Christ Christian and its political wing, Aryan Nations--one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the nation--pulled out of Montebello a dozen years ago and re-established itself in Idaho.

And the list goes on. All of this is not to say that Southern California has lost all its believers in these causes. No, indeed. But the headquarters have moved out and moved on. Southern California has lost its role as the national capital of the lunatic fringe. We have dropped off the map that we once dominated.

Why? Actually, the reason for Los Angeles’ decline as the hate capital is as simple as its ascendancy. Once we represented the nation’s greatest conglomeration of comfy whites. We had never been compromised, as had New York and Philadelphia and all the others, by waves of European immigration. From San Diego to the Tehachapis, we presented a vast breeding ground of fear for those who did not share our whiteness, and the lunatic leaders knew it.

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Those leaders also knew when the gig was up. The Rev. Richard Butler led the Church of Jesus Christ Christian in Southern California and he leads it today in Hayden Lake, Idaho. Here’s how the Rev. Butler explains the need for a change of scenery:

“It was to be among our own race. It’s genetic. Whites go with whites, mongrels go with mongrels. When I married my wife down there [in Montebello] in 1941, it was a white city. It’s not a white city now. You know, a nation is a race and a country is the household where the race lives. If your house becomes infested with nonwhites, you move out and get a new household.”

So there you have it. Southern California dropped off the racist headquarters map when it became the Ellis Island of the ‘80s. The Koreans, the Salvadorans, the Vietnamese, the Mexicans, the Cambodians pushed out the lunatic right every time they started a new business or showed up in junior high school. The Aryan Nations and the John Birch Society looked faintly ridiculous when surrounded by faces of every color, so they scurried off to safer havens.

Look, let’s face it, we pay many costs in Southern California for our new diversity. We have language problems in the schools, we have awkward social encounters on the streets, and sometimes we fight. It’s hard. So maybe here we have a reason to celebrate a little bit of good news that comes along with all the problems. The Rev. Butler has moved to Idaho, and he likes it there.

Peace be with you, Rev. Just don’t look back.