Background Report on Racist and Anti-Semitic Organizational Intervention in
the Farm Protest Movement
Prepared by Leonard Zeskind
Research Director
Center for Democratic Renewal
Atlanta, GA
Copyright 1985
Center for Democratic Renewal
Far-right racist and anti-semitic organizations and individuals are currently engaged in a campaign across the rural Midwest. They are using a variety of organizational techniques to gain converts to their cause. Their activity has spread to an ever wider strata of the rural population and has become increasingly more sophisticated in the last several years. This campaign has tried to bring its message of hate and scapegoating from the extremist edges of society into the mainstream of political and social life. In many instances they have attempted to dress their anti-democratic message in the clothes of concern for family-style agriculture. Unfortunately, there is evidence that this campaign has had some success.
Because it is difficult to develop strict quantitative analysis of a movement that operates essentially in secret, exact numbers on the various organizational efforts do not exist. It is our estimate that the racist and anti-semitic movement has between 2,000 and 5,000 hard-core activists in the Great Plains-Midwest, and between seven and ten sympathizers for each activist. While the potential for this cancer in the democratic fabric of our country to grow is great, a very real danger already exists. Stockpiling of weapons and ammunition is an increasing phenomenon. The speed with which potential danger turns to real tragedy is exemplified by the killing of two Federal Marshalls by Posse farmer Gordon Kahl, Kahl's own subsequent death in 1983, and the torture and murder of a five-year-old child and a 25-year-old man by a Posse leader on a Nebraska farm in 1985.
It is important to differentiate between the Posse Comitatus and the Posse-type organizations that have deliberately sought to win a mass following, particularly among distressed farmers, and groups like the Order that self-conciously repudiate trying to win a mass following among white Christians. The arrests this past Spring of members of the Order and the subsequent confessions of a number of leading members has done significant damage to that section of the neo-nazi movement, although it has not put an end to it. However, the racist and anti-semitic organizations that are attempting to win a following among farmers have been relatively unaffected by these arrests and confessions. Instead, their growth is more heavily affected by their own political savvy and the economy and politics of the farm protest movement as a whole. For example, the success of democratic organizations who have pioneered efforts to combat the racists, like the Prairiefire-Iowa Farm Unity Coalition and the North American Farm Alliance, has provided distressed farmers with real alternatives to the racists and anti-semites.
In this background document we have delineated the major organizations and individuals that are a part of this anti-semitic campaign in the Great Plains-Midwest. We explain where they have come from, what they are doing, and how they are doing it. And we have explored the successes and the limitations that this racist movement has had.
BACKGROUND EVENTS
Serious efforts by Far-Right organizations to intervene in the current farm protest movement began in the late seventies. In 1978 Lyndon LaRouche's cult began actively courting members of the newly-formed American Agriculture Movement (AAM). LaRouche set up aide-caucus rooms at AAM national conventions and founded a short-lived enterprise, the Parity Foundation, in an effort to win farmer recruits. He met with limited success.
After Missouri farmer Wayne Cryts took his soybeans out of a bankrupt grain elevator in the Spring of 1981 the farm protest movement began to spread. The anti-semitic Liberty Lobby jumped in with both feet and began to cover events on a regular basis. In May, 1982 the Liberty Lobby's weekly tabloid, The Spotlight, carried an effusive interview with Cryts from his Arkansas jail cell. By then conspiracy theories were rampant at the AAM "Grassroats" office in Campo, Colorado. During the Summer of 1982 the Posse Comitatus made a serious organizing effort in Western Kansas. A para-military training exercise conducted by long-time neo-nazi leader Bill Gale in Weskan, Kansas attracted "Grassroats" spokesman Alvin Jenkins. Radio station KTTL-FM in Dodge City began to broadcast "sermons" by Bill Gale and Jim Wickstrom. Wickstrom was the self-proclaimed Director of Counter-Insurgency for the Posse Comitatus. He had already had a number of altercations with law enforcement officials in his home state of Wisconsin. In January, 1983, 250 farmers tried to prevent the foreclosure of AAM leader Jerry Wright's farm in Springfield, Colorado. Wright made his Posse sympathies widely known, and told the press he was a member of the Farmers Liberation Army.
By the summer of 1983 the Far Right forces around Lyndon LaRouche worked in tandem with the forces around The Spotlight successfully enough to become a factor in the split between AAM, Inc. and AAM Grassroats. By that time AAM had lost a lot of its organizational momentum and no one organization could claim hegemony over the developing militancy of the farm protest movement. Democratic-minded organizations began a serious effort to win adherents among a new generation of farmer-activists. They met with some limited successes also. In recent years the Far Right has retained a number of its initial AAM cadres, but it has lost the special place it once had in AAM.
