Customer Reviews

A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America

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Eloquent, brilliant, insightful and fair, Elinor Langer's A Hundred Little Hitlers, published by Metropolitan Books is the true story of what really happened in Portland, Oregon on November 13, 1988 when three racist skinheads fought with three Ethiopians -- and one of the Ethiopians was beaten to death with a baseball bat.

I was a police officer on the Portland Police Bureau when this murder happened, working crime analysis at the downtown precinct, a job that included monitoring the growing number of racist and non-racist skinheads in the city. After the murder, the skinhead population and their crimes escalated as in no other city, so I was sent to the Gang Enforcement Team where I could monitor skins and investigate their crimes. I spent four years focusing on them, including working as a bodyguard for Tom Metzger during the two-week civil trial, which is covered so well in A Hundred Little Hitlers.

Though I was "the skinhead expert" and Public Information Officer for everything that was skinhead related, Langer's painstaking research and powerful, compelling writing kept me turning the pages, mumbling at least a hundred times, "I didn't know that."

This book is more than just a gripping tale of murder. Langer includes the history of the white supremacy movement; history of the various players; the politics in the movement, in the justice system and in the city; police procedure; and courtroom drama, all told from the standpoint of scholarly research, and profound analysis and conclusions. She shows great bravery as she paints a picture that isn't always politically correct in the delicate world of race relations. But she does so with truth, which wasn't always the case during this period (and still isn't today).

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, black gangs were shooting up neighborhoods virtually every night, Southeast Asian gangs were terrorizing their own community with high-tech, automatic weapons, and Hispanic gangs were killing each other and spraying innocent neighborhoods with bullets. Some of this made the news, but much of it didn't. But should a skinhead draw a swastika on a wall, it led at 5 o'clock.

I tried for two years to get a reporter to do a story that showed how black gangs often perpetrated more racially motivated crimes than skinheads. Finally, one reporter had the guts. The camera showed me holding 24 police reports of black on white crimes, but only six reports depicting skinhead crimes against minorities in the same four-week period. The next day, the reporter got in trouble at his TV station, and I was ordered by the chief's office to never, ever, do that again. The truth was not politically correct.

Langer doesn't mention this specifically, but she does discuss how the relationships between whites and blacks in Portland "required immediate vengeance for the death." She discusses how the police produced a politically acceptable case to the DA, rather than digging deeper into the facts of what really occurred the night of the murder. She talks about how the Justice Department had elicited the "racial motivation" plea bargain, which was the platform for all that followed. And she asks what would have happened if Tom Metzger had not been the "white supremacist of the hour," if Morris Dees had not had his "agency" theory all ready for his next target, and if the three skinheads had gone to trial and all the facts, the truth, had been brought out.

This is an incredible, courageous writing achievement, a definitive work about a murder, about hate, about our justice system, and about morals.

From a guy who was there, I highly recommend A Hundred Little Hitlers.

I am not going to make this a lengthy review but I do have to say that I found this book terribly interesting and extremely compelling. While I am fully aware of hate groups, it was not really until I read this book that I really thought about such groups. While I was saddened to read about the death of the Ethiopian man in the book, I was equally saddened to read the second part of the book and the travesty of the court proceedings. This book kept me reading... at stoplights, while cooking, and other places I shall not mention-lol. I also found myself checking out information on the web about hate groups and was disturbed to see how many hate groups-both mainstays and splinter groups there really are out there. I slightly agree with a previous reviewer that there are many other hate groups that deserve equal attention and may actually be a bigger threat to society as a whole than the skinhead movement.
What I found interesting in the book was that the author spent some time making the reader feel sorry for the victim for the injustice done to him by the skinheads, but in the second part of the book made the reader feel slightly sorry for the skinheads for the injustices in the trial(s). Overall, this book was excellent and worth reading.

Elinor Langer's book examines the 1988 killing of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon, by three skinheads who identified with a neo-Nazi movement. Through extensive research, interviews with the participants and with friends of the victim, and extraordinary access to police records, she describes in brilliant detail the lives of the Portland skinheads, the origin of their beliefs, and their movements in the months and hours leading up to the killing. This is a courageous book because Langer, an avowed liberal who was deeply distressed by the incident and the values of the perpetrators, nevertheless looks at these young people with considerable detachment in an attempt to understand them. The case led to a trial in Portland prosecuted by Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Langer was present at the trial, and drawing both on her experience in the courtroom and a careful examination of the court records as well as the legal maneuvers that led to the conviction of Tom Metzger, a California racist and leader of the White Aryan Resistance, she shows how evidence at the trial was shaped in order to argue the influence of W.A.R. on the Portland skinheads. The prosecution gained a conviction against Metzger, in part, Langer maintains, to allow Portland and Oregonians to transcend if not ignore the state's and the city's own racist past. The book tells a fascinating story, and is gripping from start to finish. Above all, it suggests that racism and the neo-Nazi movement are ongoing problems, which, even in Oregon, did not disappear with the successful verdict against Metzger. This is a deliberately disturbing and memorable book, one which will be talked about for a long time to come.

To start with, this isn't a bad book by any means; the material where Ms. Langer describes the entire sad, disgusting, and oppressive subculture of the neo-Nazi skinheads is sharply drawn and superbly detailed. However, those sections unfortunately have to share space with others that are driven by the author's most unconvincing and undermining two ideas: the insistence that Tom Metzger must be viewed at least somewhat positively because he is a powerful leader (of lost causes who follow his diseased imprint) and a devoted family man and father (in contrast to Morris Dees, in a disturbing parallel where the author strongly implies that Dees' multiple divorces make him less admirable than Metzger's fidelity to his neo-Nazi wife and neo-Nazi kids), and her bewilderment that the entire investigative and legal side of the Seraw murder wasn't conducted in accordance with precisely the left-wing libertarian view that would have saved Metzger from a crushing defeat in the SPLC's civil trial (though Langer, once again curiously, goes out of her way to state that Metzger continued to produce his hate materials after losing a $12.5 million judgment, as if the trial should have ended either will Dees killing Metzger or Metzger committing suicide). I'm not trying to be snide, but it's hard to avoid being angered by a work that jumps the rails from empathy to sympathy for someone as vile as Metzger, and then castigates everyone who didn't share that sympathy and worked LEGALLY to take down his sick self, from the cops who didn't insist that this WAS NOT a hate crime to the SPLC representatives who didn't throw the case because poor Tom Metzger represented his incompetent self at his trial. If someone wants to read a book about how skinheads are bad but taking non-violent, facts-based action against them is mean-spirited at best and mendacious at worst, this is the one for you. The author's bias takes a good start of journalism and turned it into a second-rate op-ed piece.

My boyfriend and I both read this book. He bought Langer's interpretation of events. I don't.

I think the most disturbing aspect of the book is Ms. Langer's "averaged" scenario of the murder, which she presents as fact. How hard would it have been to explicitly state, "and it could have happened this way just as easily as the way the prosecution said it did"? It would not have taken away from the point she was trying to make to do it that way. In the end notes, she says, as a disclaimer about this section, "I was not there." Well, then, why did she set up every reader to believe that the scenario she presented was unvarnished fact? If the author was motivated to write the book to set the record straight, she should not have had to make anything up, especially not about the actual murder.

What I think is obvious is the author's need for the murder to be "a drunk thing" and not a racist one. Lots of people have opinions, but not everyone spends years researching and writing a book about it. That was interesting to me.

Also, the way she presents the legal section is with a layman's shock. Metger did not competently defend himself, but that is a separate issue from the prosecution's actions, and Ms. Langer appears unable to separate them. Just because Metger set himself up to be a fish getting shot in a barrel doesn't mean the prosecution shouldn't shoot.

It presents a side of Portland and Oregon that I did not know. I think people should read the book, but I think the book raises more questions than it answers.

Murder happens all the time in this country. A brutal murder that's movitated simply by racism and committed by a Nazi skinhead in the United States, though, is quite another matter. In 1988 a Nazi skinhead by the name of Kenneth Mieske beat the head in of a Ethiopian immigrant by the name of Mulugeta Seraw over a minor disagreement that gets out of hand. Elinor Langer's fine book provides the background, the pathology if you like, of this disease that allows violence against people of other races to continue in our country.

Langer begins with the murder and then traces the roots of the movement in Portland that gave rise to the neo-Nazi skinhead movement in her state. She also looks at the poverty, submerged anger, drug use and philosphy that feeds the anger that leads to events like this. In many respects, Langer's book (which began as a series of ongoing articles about the case) provides a glimpse into America's darker side. We discover how the movement began, how it spreads and how it takes root in communities outside her own as well.

While it isn't necessarily the easiest book to read, it's compelling and thoughtful. It's not lite reading for the beach but it's the type of book for those interested in how society makes a wrong turn as it grows and matures. Her coverage of the trial, the evidence and the feelings of those involved gives a borad perspective into what fans the flames of monsterous acts in our world. A Hundred Little Hitlers frightens me worse than any Stephen King novel or the latest "Resident Evil" movie could because it's about the world around us.

So many works of history and socalled journalism in contemporary publication absolutely lack a keen study of primary sources. These weak narratives are typically compilations of reports from second and third hand hearsay observers. This work is strong where those are weak. I have checked some of the primary sources used by the author in this work and will confirm the previous comments from other reviewers about the accuracy of the information delivered and the insightfulness of the presentation.

The work illumintates some of the weaknesses of the civil courts system. Exposed is the problem of the expensiveness of affording counsel, and how it can ruin a person in a litigious society. Also the old legal concepts of "champertry" and "barratry" are two words that I did not see in the work, but, they came to mind as I read it.

The book is an easy read and refreshing for its investigative depth and precision, as well as the stylistic moderation, which lacks that obnoxious contemporary style which so often demonizes the players in a narrative in an overwrought attempt to create tension and sales.

Buy this book and mark it well.

One of the few books I have seen written by someone outside the so called white nationalist scene pertaining to anything to do with it that is fair and even sided to everyone involved.

A drunken brawl breaks out between skinheads and Ethiopian immigrants late one night in Portland Oregon. One of the Ethiopians dies. A chain of events occurs where opportunistic "activists" somehow find a way to sue Tom Metzger, even though he lived in Southern California and I believe had never even spoken to anyone involved with the fight that resulted in the Ethiopians death, win the lawsuit and take everything he worked his whole life for. The whole crux of the lawsuit was Metzger was responsible because an associate of his had given the Portland skinheads some of Metzgers literature!

Langer does a good job of showing the skinhead scene for what it is, mainly people in their early 20's and teens who came from dysfunctional families going through a "stage" they will soon grow out of, having more to do with fashion, socializing and being part of a "scene" than anything else, lacking any real focus in their idealology, and with a few exceptions the worst thing they are really doing is petty street violence, ie, getting getting drunk and getting in fights, not unlike a lot of frat boys I might add. Which like another reviewer mentioned is pretty lightweight when compared to what so called minority youth gangs are involved in.

The author is very fair and sympathetic in her portrayal of Metzger. Even if you despise his ideas on race and politics its hard not to like him on the personal level from reading this book, reminding me almost of retired old men that hang out in a small town barbershops telling jokes and talking about politics.

Her portrayal of the "activist" Morris Dees is less flattering as he comes off as a sleazy opportunistic egotistical sort who exploited this whole situation for his own personal gain. Dees organization the Southern Poverty Law Center takes in millions every year, while the family of the slain Ethiopian, who Dees represented, has recieved very little in the way of compensation even though the multi-million dollar lawsuit was won by Dees.

As soon as I read the backflap of this book I immediately questioned how much "research" the author actually did on 'skinhead' culture. First off, original skinhead has nothing to do with the Nazis. It originated from 1960s England, and no not from punk. Its roots are in reggae, ska, the rude boys from Jamaica. Look up Trojan Records. And yes, Jamaica. If it weren't for Jamaica 'skinhead' would not exist. I wish the author had used the term "Bonehead", its what REAL skinheads call Nazis who have hijacked the label of skinhead. Because to be a true skinhead you can not in fact be racist. Skinheads became associated with white supremacy in England when the National Front began recruiting them in the 80s. Anyways.. interesting read other than the glaring flaw of misrepresentation of a subculture that actually has nothing to do with hate crimes and lack of research the author did on the actual origins of skinhead.

I was very unimpressed with this book. Elinor Langer simply does not strike me as a particularly good writer, and at times her prose was positively painful to read. Furthermore, she seems to have a great deal of difficulty picking a narrative voice, style, or perspective, and sticking with them. This may be related to the fact that most of her book seems to suffer from a similar affliction of not quite knowing what it's supposed to be: is it an account of the killing itself; a biography of the principal players; historical background on the White racist movement in America; or a critique of the way the police investigation and the Southern Poverty Law Center tried to tie other White Racists to the three skinheads? Langer seems incapable of choosing a focus; and the book- and reader- suffers as a result. It reads as chaotic, uneven, and more like a decent first draft rather than a polished, finished product.

Obviously, historical and biographical background are integral to understanding the personalities and motivations of the people involved in this story, and these sketches make up some of the more interesting sections in the book, but Langer doesn't seem to know when enough is enough. Instead of limiting herself to say, describing the Ethiopians, skinheads, and a few others, she instead tries to give us the "life story" of nearly anyone even remotely connected to the case- including many figures on the racist, radical right that had nothing to do with it at all. This is all the more bizarre because the main premise of Langer's book is that the death of Ethiopian Mulugeta Seraw was not racially motivated, and that therefore, the subsequent lawsuit against White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger (on the grounds that he was partially responsible for the man's death) was unfair and unjust. Essentially, Langer tries to paint the three men involved in the killing as having been marginal skinheads at best, or "social skinheads". But if that's the case- and there's certainly some evidence to support it- why go into so much historical detail about "the movement"?

Langer also seems to have the problem of being, at times, too close to the subject matter. Because she is a Portland-based author and was living here during the years leading up to the incident and arrests, and then through the subsequent media coverage and police investigations, she seems to feel as if she almost has a responsibility to share what her feelings were at the time. Were she a better author, this could work. As it is, though, her (mercifully) occasional personal musings just serve to further interrupt an already excessively choppy narrative. At one point, she goes so far as to detail all the reasons why it would be so difficult to reconstruct the "Portland punk scene" of the 1980s- and then proceeds to try, anyway, with very mixed results.

The book is not without its good points. Langer does a very good job of raising some important points, including the quandary of how informing the public about racist groups generates free publicity for them, as well as pointing out (albeit unconsciously) how, whether one is a lawyer, police officer, reporter, or white supremacist, there is always an element of extra-factual "art" involved with selling or presenting an idea or story to the public. I also enjoyed the description of Portland's racial and cultural histories. Also, as stated earlier, Langer is particularly adept at biography, and her descriptions of the three skinheads and Tom Metzger are quite fascinating, although there, once again, her work is marred by her preference for abruptly tangential sentences and unnecessary hyperbole.

It's also interesting that while it's clear she at least attempts to give everyone in the story a fair shake; her descriptions of Metzger come off as being somewhat overly sympathetic, verging on the affectionate, in sharp contrast to, for instance, the Portland community as a whole, or members of the legal system, whom she sharply dismisses with a few lines. Langer does a good job of pointing out how the media and community leaders were quick to paint the incident as the "(good) Ethiopians" versus the "(bad) Skinheads", but it is unclear if, in trying to point out this bias, she does not fall into a similar trap. Nowhere is this discrepancy better illustrated than when contrasting her depictions of Tom Metzger and Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Any faults Metzger has are chalked up to "mere" ideology; he is portrayed as a friendly, devoted family man, dedicated to "his cause". Dees is painted as a distrustful, selfish, "corporate" lawyer, characterized by a "whatever-it-takes-to-win attitude". While Langer seems to want to like Metzger in spite of his flaws, she seems incapable of seeing Dees as being anything but his flaws.

This is not to say that Langer's criticisms of Dees or the SPLC are necessarily unfounded; just that she does not seem to be terribly objective or even-handed in her descriptions and subsequent characterizations. Nor, more interestingly, does she seem to even be aware of this palpable bias.

In short, I believe I may understand what Langer was trying to do in this book, but remain unconvinced that she does it well.