A Trip to the Birthplace of Racist Ideologies

Buford Furrow’s journey from Washington to Southern California was a kind of pilgrimage back to the birthplace of his racist creed.

The hate group to which Furrow belongs and the broader religio-political movement linking white supremacist groups across the country began in Southern California and was centered here for decades before moving to other states.

The Aryan Nations, the neo-Nazi group with which Furrow has been involved, is one of several hate groups that draw on the murky doctrines of Christian Identity, a racist, anti-Semitic movement that emerged in Los Angeles and is now followed by an estimated 50,000 Americans. Christian Identity “is connected to the lion’s share of domestic terrorism,” according to Joe Roy of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

Whether Furrow fixed on Los Angeles because it was his Hitlerian holy land or because its sprawling, multiethnic landscape was rich with targets of opportunity and avenues of escape remains a subject for conjecture.

But Richard G. Butler, the 80-year-old head of the Aryan Nations, which is based in Hayden Lake, Idaho, has named as his successor Neuman Britton, a Christian Identity leader who lives near San Diego.

Furrow has been an Aryan Nations member since at least 1995, when he was married inside the group’s compound to Debra Mathews, widow of a slain white supremacist leader. The ceremony reportedly was performed by Butler, who is also a Christian Identity minister.

Today, the area surrounding the Aryan Nations compound is a well-known cradle of far-right groups. White separatist Randy Weaver held his infamous standoff with federal agents a few miles from Hayden Lake, and prominent Holocaust denial, militia and Christian Identity groups are just a short drive apart.

But the ideological seeds from which these and many other contemporary hate groups sprang were planted in Los Angeles.

Oddly enough, Christian Identity stems from the same wave of British emigres who early in this century gave Los Angeles a cosmopolitan cast. The city was then a mecca for sectarians and “seekers,” who gathered in salons and ashrams around gurus and mediums.

By and large, their impact was benign. But there was an exception: the tiny congregation of Anglo-Israelites, who established themselves in Hollywood. They were products of one of the critical intellectual problems that assailed late 19th century British society, which was finding a continuing justification for imperialism.

One solution was to appropriate the new biology of Charles Darwin and give it a political cast. Britons, this argument went, simply were the product of better “natural selection” than the “lesser” races they were fated to rule by evolutionary determinism.

Another, far less-known rationale was pseudo-theological and was called Anglo-Israelism. It held that Anglo-Saxons were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and the only survivors of the group described in the first books of the Bible as Jews, who were in fact a “Nordic race.” The people known as Jews in the contemporary world, Anglo-Israelites claimed, were descendants of--depending on who was doing the telling--an unholy relationship between Satan and Eve or Satan and the daughters of Cain.

People of color were said to be not human at all, but created by the devil out of mud and, like animals, without souls. Jesus, the believers held, was killed by the “satanic” Jews because he was of pure Nordic blood.

The Seeds of Hate

At some point in the 1940s, Hollywood’s “Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation” found a new American pastor, Wesley Swift, a West Coast organizer for the anti-Semitic American populist Gerald L.K. Smith. “All Jews must be destroyed,” Swift wrote in the early 1950s.

Two of Swift’s early converts were retired U.S. Army Col. William Potter Gale and Butler. Gale, a guerrilla warfare expert in the South Pacific during World War II, was an early leader of the extremist Posse Comitatus, a precursor of the contemporary militia movement.

Another leading Christian Identity ideologue is a virulently anti-Semitic former securities dealer named Richard Kelly Hoskins, whose ideas have been invoked by terrorists linked to bank robberies and attacks on abortion clinics. A copy of Hoskins’ book “War Cycles, Peace Cycles” was found in Furrow’s van.

Butler, often referred to as “the elder statesman of American hate,” moved to Hayden Lake in 1973 after he quit his job at the Lockheed Corp. in Palmdale, where he coordinated the final assembly of L-1011 passenger jets.

When Swift died in 1970, Butler proclaimed his Church of Jesus Christ Christian to be the successor to Swift’s congregation.

This year, Butler tapped Britton as his heir apparent. Britton, 73, was chosen over Louis Beam, a Texas Christian Identity minister. Hate group observers say that Beam had fallen out of favor for toning down his anti-Semitism to focus on an anti-government message.

Britton is married to Joan Kahl, the former wife of Gordon Kahl, a North Dakota Posse Comitatus member who was killed in a 1983 Arkansas shootout with law enforcement officials.

Butler, who may be in failing health, has willed his Idaho property to his two grown daughters, neither of whom are Aryan Nations adherents, according to Sue Stengel, Western states counsel for the Anti-Defamation League. Stengel said that Butler’s children may not want the property to continue as an Aryan compound, which could prompt the group to move its base to Southern California, Britton’s home.

Britton, however, said he has reservations about basing the group in such a racially mixed area.

An avuncular man who sprinkles his conversations with biblical references and claims of Jewish conspiracies, Britton denies knowing Furrow, and condemned the attack because its victims were children.

Receiving a reporter at his Escondido home, where he also holds Aryan Nations suppers, Britton was surrounded by signs of how tough it is to be a white supremacist in California.

Several mixed-race children frolicked in Britton’s backyard, clients of his daughter’s home day-care business. “I don’t like it, but it’s the law,” he said, explaining that his daughter is forbidden from practicing racial discrimination in her business.

Britton’s single-story house is on five acres overlooking Interstate 15 and an elementary school. “They’ve destroyed our school system,” he lamented, decrying what he says was the downturn that occurred when its enrollment shifted from “all-white to 90% minority. It’s the Mexicans who’ve done it,” he said.

California’s large minority population, he said, would get in the way of Aryan Nations activities. “We’d have a war,” he said of the prospect of holding an annual meeting in Southern California, “unless we went up in the mountains somewhere and bought property.”

California may never again be a desirable headquarters for the Aryan Nations, but Los Angeles holds an important place in the terrorist imagination. “The Turner Diaries,” an apocalyptic novel whose readers have included Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh, depicts a massacre in Los Angeles.

Furrow’s estranged wife, Debra Mathews, is the widow of Robert Mathews, a founder of the Order, a terrorist group that took its name from “The Turner Diaries.”

The Order had been linked by authorities to robberies of armored cars and stores in Washington and California, the proceeds of which were allegedly donated to white supremacist groups. The Order also claimed responsibility for the June 1984 murder of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg.

Robert Mathews was killed in December 1984 at a house on Whidbey Island in Washington. After using a machine gun to hold off federal agents for 36 hours, Mathews was burned when the agents fired flares into his house, setting it ablaze.

It is not hard to imagine that Furrow held somewhere in his memory the epitaph that William Pierce, author of “The Turner Diaries,” bestowed on Robert Mathews after his death: “How will the Jews cope with the man who does not fear them and is willing, even glad, to give his life in order to hurt them? What will they do when a hundred good men rise to take Robert Mathews’ place?”

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Hate Group Ties

The hate group to which Buford O. Furrow Jr. belongs is part of a loosely affiliated nationwide group of political and religious extremists.

Sources: “Danger: Extremism--The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far-Right Fringe,” published by the Anti-Defamation League; Researched by LYNN MEERSMAN/Los Angeles Times