Hatred’s Children

George Lincoln Rockwell, a godfather of evil, would have been proud.

The last year of the 20th century has burned with racial and ethnic hatred across America. Synagogues have been torched. Blacks, gays, Asians and Jews have been murdered. White supremacist Web sites have flourished.

Like acid eating through human flesh, hatred has sizzled through layers of indifference to the core of who and what we are.

Institutions that pose as churches preach hatred to those who define Christianity as Hitler defined it, packaged in an ideology that celebrates a master race. Online sites offer “games” that preach mockery and hatred. By one estimate, 2,000 such sites exist on the Internet. Their target: children.

In his way, Rockwell foresaw the white supremacist World Church of the Creator. He envisioned an appeal to youth. And he knew that his odious army of misanthropes needed the working class to succeed.

As founder of the American Nazi Party, he “Americanized” Hitler’s twisted philosophies in the years following the Second World War. His numbers were never great, but his message of white supremacy was clear. And despite his death more than three decades ago, the message continues to resonate.

One chilling example: Hate crimes in L.A.’s public schools rose by 15% last year. Rockwell’s “children” are learning fast.

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His place in the resurgence of racism and anti-Semitism is contained in a biography by Frederick J. Simonelli called “American Fuehrer.” Read it and you’ll understand to some extent why a slick racist rabble-rouser like David Duke exists today. You’ll know why there are skinheads and why there are churches that preach the ugliest forms of separatism.

Rockwell redefined Nazism to fit America. His only enemies were Jews and blacks. He opened his Nazi Party to everyone else.

“It was a brilliant move,” Simonelli said in a telephone interview. He’s in Israel studying the Holocaust. “Rockwell opened the ‘master race’ to the working class and formed the white racist movement of today.”

Hitler’s Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan would not have allowed membership by many of the nation’s ethnic minorities, Simonelli adds. Today, most of the hate crimes emerge from the groups that Rockwell embraced.

He also understood catch-phrase ideology, twisting a civil rights call for black power into an insidious chant of white power. One was a plea for equality, the other a demand for supremacy.

And by “popularizing” a Holocaust revisionist dogma in America, he managed to merge Nazism with Christianity, laying the groundwork for today’s hate-preaching cathedrals of racism.

An assistant professor of history at Mount St. Mary’s College, Simonelli has researched the life of hatred’s godfather for almost a decade. He knows him well. I knew him too.

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Alex Haley was my link to George Lincoln Rockwell. The two couldn’t have been more different. Haley, the author of “Roots,” was a gentle, open man. Rockwell was manipulative and evil, tapping into boiling streams of hatred bubbling below the surface of the body politic.

They met when Haley interviewed Rockwell for Playboy magazine. Years later, I would write a television movie based partially on that interview. Months of research followed, including interviews with Rockwell’s brother and his 90-year-old father, a bewildered old vaudevillian.

I created a Rockwell trapped by his own moral deficiencies, isolated by the very credo he had espoused, targeted by the followers he had enlisted. In the end, he was assassinated, as he knew he would be, by one of his own.

My script was at first greeted with enthusiasm. I had taken pains to walk the line between reality and drama. Haley said it was more than real, it was true. He had walked past a sign that said “No Dogs or Niggers” into the home and the life of a man who hated him. He too had come to know him well.

The script was “concept tested” by the network. Its test audience didn’t like the idea of an American Nazi, and the project was dumped. That was 20 years ago.

What I couldn’t do on television, Simonelli has done with a book, establishing Rockwell’s place in American racial chaos. His legacy flourishes. The children of hatred are coming along just fine.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.