William Pierce, the leading ideologue of the US neo-Nazi movement, who published a book that inspired the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, died on July 23rd, aged 68. A trained physicist, William Pierce founded the National Alliance, the most successful, wealthiest and best-organised hate group in the US, which he ran from a building on his 400 acres of grounds near Hillsboro, West Virginia. The movement never had more than about 1,500 members, but William Pierce's influence extende
He launched a "white power" music business called Resistance Records, which appealed to the skinhead audience and made an estimated $1.3 million a year, had formed a publishing firm, Vanguard Books, and produced a monthly paper called the National Vanguard.
William Pierce rarely talked to the media, which he regarded as Jewish-dominated and therefore incapable of reporting him fairly, and he was by nature a recluse. It was variously reported that he was a bachelor, a divorcee with two sons, or even that he lived with a mail-order bride from Hungary, but a spokesman for his movement said he had no successors.
His best-known product was The Turner Diaries, a self-published book he wrote in 1978 under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. In this he displayed a predilection for Scottish myths and heritage shared by others in extreme right-wing politics, including the Tennessee political extremist, David Duke. The book is set in the 1990s and tells of a neo-Nazi guerrilla group that blows up the FBI headquarters in Washington after the Day of the Rope, in which "traitorous" white people are hanged from lampposts.
It was favourite reading for Timothy McVeigh, the Gulf War veteran executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, in which 168 people died. Prosecutors described the book as a "blueprint" detailing the kind of bomb McVeigh used. A passage from it was found in his car after his arrest.
William Pierce inspired other hate crimes, including a wave of violent robberies and murders during the 1980s carried out by the Order, another white supremacist splinter group, and the machine-gun murder of the Jewish radio talk show host, Alan Berg, in Denver in 1984. William Pierce demurred when asked about his influence, but he was undoubtedly the movement's theoretician - although this amounted to little more than proposing the expulsion of all blacks and Jews from America.
William Pierce was also a shrewd manipulator of his potential public. He formed a group called the National Youth Alliance in 1970 and believed in recruiting from the young. As well as his record company, he sponsored video games - one was called Ethnic Cleansing - and he quickly realised the potential of the Internet, with a flurry of websites promoting his racist rantings.
He was born on September 11th, 1933, to middle-class parents in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of an insurance salesman and journalist mother. After some state schooling he attended a military academy in Texas and acquired his bachelor's degree from Rice University in Houston. He obtained a Master's and a Ph.D in physics from the University of Colorado.
After teaching physics at Oregon State University, and working briefly in jet propulsion at a Pratt & Whitney laboratory, he turned to extremist politics in the mid-1960s, linking up with George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party and National Socialist White People's Party, before Rockwell's murder in 1967. William Pierce remained a leader of this movement before forming his Alliance group in 1974. He was monitored by the FBI but never convicted of any crime.
Pierce mostly remained hidden from view on his property, where he also dabbled in quasi-religious movements, founding at one time a sect with no god called the Cosmotheist Church. He kept up a wide network of fellow extremists in South Africa, Europe and Britain, including the British National Party's former leader, John Tyndall.
As well as The Turner Diaries, he published a bestseller called The Hunter and dedicated it to Joseph Paul Franklin, a serial murderer who numbered among his victims two white women who had said they were going out with African-Americans. Yet his aides would maintain that he was a badly misunderstood, gentle man who merely wanted to retain the US for people of European - preferably northern - descent.
In reality, he revelled in violence, as his writing shows. After the Day of the Rope, his hero comes across a hanged figure in Los Angeles wearing a placard saying: "I defiled my race." William Pierce wrote: "Above the placard leered the horribly bloated, purplish face of a young woman, her eyes wide open and bulging, her mouth agape." He added that "many thousands" of women were hanged around the city because they had married or lived with blacks, Jews or "other non-white males".
A struggle for dominance of the extreme right in America is likely to follow William Pierce's death, but nobody seems likely to match his canny opportunism and powers of organisation.
William Luther Pierce: born 1933; died, July 2002