Customer Reviews

Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This work presents Commander Rockwell as a real person, warts and all. It is the most complete volume I have ever seen about the White Power movement of the 1960s. It is for the most part unbiased and presents most of this thrilling saga without the left wing hand wringing that usually goes along with a work on this subject. My complaints are few: More pictures are needed for a book like this. There is a heavy reliance upon Rockwell's book,"This Time The World" and some of it is not correctly rendered in "Hate". There is not enough emphasis on the last 2 years of Rockwell's life which were probably the most important ones. I can still say that I highly recomend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

After all these years George Lincoln Rockwell still remains one of the most interesting figures to appear on the white nationalist scene. Son of a famous in his day vaudeville performer, went to an ivy league school, flew missions in ww2 and Korea, married to the daughter of the Icelandic ambassador to the United States, a talented artist and cartoonist, the list goes on and on. Rockwell really is someone who could have been a success at almost anything he chose to in life and is not the typical maladjusted freak that often gravitates toward white nationalism in its various forms.

Schmaltz has written a very fair and unbiased account of Rockwell and his "stormtroopers", who were a menage of brawlers, ex-cons and misfits along with some genuinly talented individuals. Rockwell in many ways was like a great pro wrestling heel with his agitation techniques, he inflamed crowds beyond the boiling point to out and out brawling riots many a time, but he also often won over initially hostile crowds using his sense of humor, (Rockwell was a VERY funny guy!) He was also the first public figure in the white nationalist scene to reject and ridicule the right wing, he was the first to draw alliances with black radicals (he had meetings with Malcolm X and was a guest speaker at NOI rallies a few times) so he was and actually still is a man years ahead of his time in many ways. The life of Rockwell is covered in this book from childhood to his assassination at the hands of one of his most dedicated followers in a very fair, unbiased, and fascinating account of the life and times of GLR.

I waited until Simonelli's competing book came out before making this review. Schmaltz's book is much better, bigger, more interesting, and, although Schmaltz is no Rockwell fan, more balanced.

This is relatively unbiased biography of Rockwell's fearless attempts to gain power, exploits to gain publicity, stormtroopers, lieutenants, management difficulties, assassination, and the methods his enemies used against him.

This book takes you inside the American Nazi Party HQ with details on the inside power struggles and the abject poverty in which Rockwell and his followers lived. It also provides many interesting stories of the confrontations of with the police, hostile crowds, and college audiences. Also of interest is the illegal methods the FBI used against Rockwell and the attempts of the Jewish groups to keep the news media from reporting about Rockwell.

This fascinating book is one you'll finish. Its only weak spot is that it doesn't tell why Rockwell believed what he did. Schmaltz apparently left that for Rockwell to tell in his own book "White Power," which is still available.

I think the Author Mr. Schmaltz, has done a darn good job at recording the dates, names and places of the activities, people and events in the life of George Lincoln Rockwell. However the tone of this book had me wondering, if the Author had to spinkle incense on the alter of Diversity/Multi-Culturalism in order to have this book published. Certain Quotes like that of someone identified as a cousin of Rockwell, describing George Lincoln and his father Doc Rockwell "as both con-men". Than the out of the blue statement describing Lincoln Rockwell's teeth as yellow stained, only served to raise serious questions in my mind of the fairness and objectivity of the author. Again and again the author could not disprove the facts Rockwell put forward, but returned to the old Liberal formula of not attacking the message only the messenger. The author later has to grudingly admit that Rockwell was right, when Rockwell said that virtually all the people advising Martin Luther King were Communist. The author failed many times in his scholarship, he (the author) never quoted one word from Rockwell's book "White Power", or Rockwell's Autobiography "This Time The World" only served to undermind the quality of this book.

This is the best of the two books on Rockwell. Schmaltz interviewed all of ANP officers and used their jolting accounts of intra-Party activity throughout the work. He also wove in very detailed accounts of how the FBI attempted to destroy the Party with their COINTELPRO activities. This is a very compelling story and a must read for anyone wanting to understand the modern White Power/Holocaust Denial movements.

Check out the bibliography--the author secured interviews will all the players of the racist movement-Matt Koehl (New Order) DeWest Hooker, Ed Fields (Nat. States Rights Party), Emory Burke (NSRP), Colin Jordan (British Nat. Party), the entire officer corp of ANP, childhood friends, all Rockwell's college speeches.

Every library should have this book!

Rockwell was a talented comedian, as was his father, but the biggest mistake of his life was promoting the belief that Nordics were superior to other members of the white race; such as Alpines and Mediterraneans. That this is foolish is evidenced by the fact that it is virtually impossible to tell with total certainty exactly what sub-racial category someone is in. There are just too many jokers in the deck; such as when a person fitting the "Nordic profile" is identifying with some other race. When anyone ignores these facts it can have fatal consequences. Rockwell was assassinated by John Patler, who was once the most active and loyal stormtrooper of his group; in fact, Patler was the party member highlighted in the original edition of Rockwell's autobiography "This Time the World" with a large photograph (It's since been censored out). Patler, a Greek American with a dark complexion, one day realized that, as a Mediterranean, he was considered inferior. The discomfort of his position greatly contributed to his determination to kill Rockwell. Why then did Rockwell recruit Patler? Patler was actually quite an intelligent person. As a writer and artist he served Rockwell well. The answer to the contradiction lays in Rockwell's lack of consistancy and expertise in racial matters. Unable to identify Jewish racial charateristics, his party attracted them. Unable to determine the intentions of black Muslims, he said he was aligned with them. Unable to create an original political movememt, he borrowed the obsolete ideology of National Socialism. Evidence of this last weakness is evidenced by the way Rockwell plagiarized the sentences of Silvershirt leader William Dudley Pelley to open his own book "This Time the World." Pelley was a more perceptive fascist leader, for he modelled his own movement in the ideological direction and style of America's sucessful veterans legions. He knew that the public would only get a good laugh out of anything else.

I found this book riveting. Once I started reading, I stayed up all night to finish it. It is very well-written and well-paced and extremely informative. At times I found myself laughing uncontrollably. The book is also remarkably balanced.
Lincoln Rockwell was a man of courage and conviction. But one has to count his life and his movement as a failure.
Like it or not, Adolf Hitler was a political genius because he fashioned a movement that was deeply in tune with German history and the German soul and rode that movement to power. Swastikas and party uniforms had deep roots in German history. If Hitler had lived in America, that same political genius would have fashioned a movement in tune with American history and the American soul--and rode it all the way to the White House. Swastikas and party uniforms would have had no part in it--particularly after America fought long and bloody war against people with swastikas and party uniforms!
Rockwell imitated the letter of Nazism, not the spirit. Therefore he failed miserably as a political leader. Rockwell's Nazism also lacked the grandeur of the real thing. Hitler modelled politics on Wagnerian opera and Roman triumphs; Rockwell modelled it on comic books and Vaudeville acts. (And he did have a great, mean, wicked sense of humor!)
One fascinating aspect of this book (like Simonelli's inferior Rockwell biography AMERICAN FUEHRER) is its careful documentation of Jewish power and media control. One particularly telling fact is that when the Nazis initially began to protest the Zionist movie EXODUS, they were greeted by howling mobs pelting them with vegetables, eggs, stones, and bricks. Then the ADL, the AJC, and the Jewish War Veterans drafted their policy of denying Rockwell media attention. At the next showing of EXODUS, there was no bloodthirsty mob. (See page 81.)

Schmaltz also points out collusion between the ADL and the FBI. [...]
It's enough to make one into a "paranoid" right-wing conspiracy monger!

Highly readable bio of the Great Man himself - buy it, read it and then hunt out GLRs own books (via Amazon) to fill in the missing bits. 88!

So proclaimed American Nazi Party (ANP) founder and leader George Lincoln Rockwell, as quoted in William Schmaltz's biography Hate (p. 210). Rockwell, whose tawdry career as a political agitator ended in 1967 when he was gunned down by a disgruntled colleague, was big on words like "hate." For him, they conveyed an honesty that he thought missing from conventional American politics. Given his strong PR sensibilities, he also knew that extreme language attracted the press. (As he said many times, for example, the word "Nazi" caught media attention in a way that less inflammatory words couldn't.)

Schmaltz's biography is a chronicle of Rockwell's transformation from the son of a vaudeville couple to the pipe-smoking, cross-armed leader of a political movement whose actual membership never numbered much more than 100. Schmaltz quickly traces Rockwell's student years, his enlistment in the Navy, his early efforts at advertising and publishing, and his two failed marriages before swinging into a year-by-year account of Rockwell's life from his founding of the ANP in 1959 to his death.

Rockwell preferred to think of himself and his "Stormtroopers" as agitators. He was masterful in a two-fisted, blunt sort of way at manipulating the press, staging guerrilla theatre events that disrupted public meetings, and using audience-appropriate speech when speaking to different groups. In the last three or four years of his life he was a regular speaker on college campuses, traveling from coast to coast. His 1965 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, while bringing him fewer than 6,000 votes, successfully gained him national media coverage.

The Rockwell that comes across in Schmaltz's biography is clearly an intelligent man with a lot of drive and discipline. But there's also an uncanny brokenness in him that's sometimes frightening and sometimes merely clownish. He throws out the coarsest racist labels without batting an eye; he tells a Canadian broadcaster that he wants to "gas queers"; he obsessively harps on the "Jewish menace," and just as obsessively insists on the racial superiority of whites to blacks; he tells student audiences, in perfect seriousness, that he'll be president of the US one day; and he likens Hitler to Christ and himself to St. Paul. He seems to thrive on a mixture of bravado, delusion, and hatred that's sometimes so buffoonish it's difficult to believe that he actually took himself seriously.

Unfortunately, it's not at all clear from Schmaltz's treatment how to understand Rockwell's brokenness. There's very little effort at getting inside the man. Instead, Schmaltz's treatment is for the most part a sometimes tiresomely listing of the external events in Rockwell's life. But at the end of the book, one still has no good sense of what makes Rockwell in particular or hatemongers in general tick. Rockwell remains elusive, enigmatic.

In fairness to Schmaltz, I should mention that he based much of his research on thousands of pages of FBI documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. None of Rockwell's ex-wives, children, or siblings would allow themselves to be interviewed. Moreover, one begins to wonder if Rockwell became so fixated on creating a public persona that less and less of the "real" Rockwell remained. Perhaps all this explains, at least in part, why the "inner" Rockwell is largely absent from Schmaltz's biography.

What I loved most about this book was how it replayed the 1960s from the perspective of the twisted mind of an "evil genius" and American Nazi inner circle.

While I'm not old enough to remember the struggles of the 60s, this book put me right there, like watching the play by play, as Rockwell and his band of misfits and loyalists attempted to capitalize on the chaos at hand.

I am astounded by the amount of detail the author uncovered through his research. From the details of Rockwell's childhood to his encounters with Malcom X and the Black Muslims (whom ironically Rockwell admired), Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The book uses much of the original dialog from actual speeches, letters and interviews.

The book includes many photos and illustrations which aid in the feeling of being there.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the civil rights movement, the 1960s, political extremism, or fanatics in general.