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Liberty Lobby

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Liberty Lobby
Formation1958
Typepolitical advocacy organization
HeadquartersWashington, D.C.
Founder
Willis Carto
Main organ
The Spotlight

Liberty Lobby was an American political advocacy organization founded in 1958 that went bankrupt in 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto and described itself as "a pressure group for patriotism; the only lobby in Washington, D.C., registered with Congress which is wholly dedicated to the advancement of government policies based on our Constitution and conservative principles."[1] Carto is noted for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.[2][3][4][5]

Views

Antisemitism

Liberty Lobby described itself as a conservative political organization. Its founder, Willis Carto, was known to hold strongly antisemitic views, and to be a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, one of a handful of post-World War II writers who revered Adolf Hitler. Yockey, writing under the pseudonym of Ulick Varange, wrote a book entitled Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, which Carto adopted as his own guiding ideology.[citation needed]

Many critics, including disgruntled former Carto associates as well as the Anti-Defamation League, have noted that Carto, more than anybody else, was responsible for keeping organized antisemitism alive as a viable political movement during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when it was otherwise completely discredited.[citation needed]

Evidence for the antisemitic stance of Liberty Lobby began to mount when numerous letters by Carto excoriating the Jews (and blaming them for world miseries) began to surface, which included statements such as "How could the West [have] been so blind. It was the Jews and their lies that blinded the West as to what Germany was doing. Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe and America." Carto's letters eventually became the subject of a federal civil lawsuit.[6] There were several other defamation lawsuits arising from publications that described Liberty Lobby as anti-semitic or racist, but it appears that Liberty Lobby never won any of these cases.[citation needed]

Other evidence of the group's antisemitic views includes the charge that the group's file cabinets contained extensive pro-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan literature. In 1969, True magazine ran a story by Joe Trento, titled "How Nazi Nut Power Has Invaded Capitol Hill".[7]

Repatriation of blacks back to Africa

Starting in October 1966 two American journalists, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, published a series of stories in their widely-syndicated "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column which recounted the findings of a former employee, Jeremy Horne.[8] Horne said he had discovered a box of correspondence between Carto and numerous government officials establishing the Joint Council of Repatriation (JCR), a forerunner organization to the Liberty Lobby. The JCR stated that their fundamental purpose was to "repatriate" blacks "back to Africa". Ex-Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Thomas Pickens Brady and various members of the White Citizens' Councils who had worked to establish the JCR, also contributed to the founding of Liberty Lobby. Other correspondence referred to U.S. Congressional support for the emerging Liberty Lobby, such as from South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, (Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948) and California U.S. Representative James B. Utt.

Pearson reported that Utt, as well as Congressman John M. Ashbrook, Ellis Yarnal Berry, W. Pat Jennings, and William Jennings Bryan Dorn, received "Statesman of the Republic" award from Liberty Lobby for their "right-wing activities".[9]

The Liberty Lobby sued for libel based on the stories in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc. The case was the most quoted Supreme Court precedent in 1997 because it established the guidelines for issuing summary judgment to end frivolous lawsuits.[10]

History

According to Chip Berlet, Liberty Lobby outwardly depicted itself to be "a patriotic populist organization seeking to restore constitutional safeguards and national sovereignty" and said that it "consistently [denied] that it [was] the least bit antisemitic, much less neofascist or quasinazi".[11]

Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium was republished by Carto's Noontide Press, which also published a number of other books and pamphlets promoting a racialist and white supremacist world view, and Liberty Lobby in turn sold and promoted these books.

While Liberty Lobby was intended to occupy the niche of a conservative anti-Communist group, Carto was meanwhile building other organizations which would take a much more explicit neo-Nazi orientation. Among these were the National Youth Alliance, a Carto-founded organization that eventually became the National Alliance. Eventually, however, Carto lost control of this organization and it fell into the hands of William Pierce. Also founded by Carto was the Institute for Historical Review, a group known for publishing Holocaust denial books and articles.[12] As with the National Youth Alliance and Noontide Press, the Institute for Historical Review fell out of Carto's hands in a hostile internal struggle. Liberty Lobby, however, remained under the control of Carto until it was disbanded in 2001.

During the 1970s, as the old anti-Communism of the 1950s and 1960s fell out of favor, Carto redefined the public image of Liberty Lobby, and began to describe it as a politically populist organization, rather than conservative or right-wing. In that time, Liberty Lobby also tried to create connections to the American political left by redistributing a report critical of President Jimmy Carter authored by frequent third-party presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche and his NCLC.[13]

Liberty Lobby was infiltrated by journalist Robert Eringer who wrote about the organization in Mother Jones in 1981.[14][15]

The Spotlight

In 1975, Liberty Lobby began publishing a weekly newspaper called The Spotlight, which ran news and opinion articles with a very populist and anti-establishment slant on a variety of subjects, but gave little indication of being extreme-right or neo-Nazi. However, critics charged The Spotlight was intended as a subtle recruiting tool for the extreme right, using populist-sounding articles to attract people from all points on the political spectrum including liberals, moderates, and conservatives, and special-interest articles to attract people interested in such subjects as alternative medicine. Critics also charged the newspaper with subtly incorporating antisemitic and white racialist undertones in its articles, and with carrying advertisements in the classified section for openly neo-Nazi groups and books.[citation needed]

The Spotlight's circulation peaked around 200,000 in the early 1980s, and although it experienced a steady drop after that, it continued to be published until the Liberty Lobby's demise in 2001.

Liberty Lobby founded the Barnes Review in 1994.[16]

Demise

In 2001, Liberty Lobby and Carto lost a civil lawsuit brought by a rival far-right group which had earlier gained control of the Institute for Historical Review, and the ensuing judgment for damages bankrupted the organization. Carto and others who had been involved in publishing The Spotlight have since started a new newspaper, the American Free Press, which is very similar in overall tone to The Spotlight.[citation needed] As of 2014, the political organization called Liberty Lobby remains defunct.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ Liberty Lobby 1987 U.S. Congress Handbook, 100th Congress (First Session)
  2. ^ "Willis Carto". Anti-Defamation League. 2009. Retrieved 2009-09-15.
  3. ^ Kaplan, Jeffrey, ed. (2000). Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right. AltaMira Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0742503403.
  4. ^ Levy, Richard, ed. (2005). Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume. ABC-CLIO. p. 107. ISBN 978-1851094394.
  5. ^ Michael, George (2005) [2003]. Confronting Right Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA. Routledge. p. 15. ISBN 978-0415628440.
  6. ^ bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/390/390.F2d.489.20690_1.html Liberty Lobby, Inc., et al., Appellants, v. Drew Pearson et al., Appellees. No. 20690. United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit, (D.D.C., Dec. 20, 1966) 261 F.Supp. 726 aff'd (DC Cir., Dec. 27, 1967) 129 U.S.App.D.C. 74, 390 F.2d 489
  7. ^ Trento, Joseph and Joseph Spear. "How Nazi Nut Power Has Invaded Capitol Hill". True (November 1969): 39.
  8. ^ "The Washington Merry-Go-Round" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-18. Liberty Lobby working furiously for right-wing cause; its secret files reveal conspiracy against Jews and Negroes; Carto's correspondents are lurid lot {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ Pearson, Drew (November 2, 1966). "Judge Rules Against Liberty Lobby". The Free Lance-Star. Fredericksburg, Virginia. p. 6. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  10. ^ List of Most-Quoted Cases[unreliable source?]
  11. ^ Berlet, Cip; Lyons, Matthew M. (2000). "9 The Pillars of U.S. Populist Conspiracism; The John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby". Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press. pp. 185–186, 188. ISBN 9781572305625. Retrieved September 10, 2014. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
  12. ^ Davis, James D. "Erasing The Holocaust It's In The History Books. It's Taught In Our Schools. It's Forever Burned Into The Memories Of Survivors. Yet A Small Group Of Self-styled Experts Claims The Holocaust Never Occurred." Sunrise Sentinel, April 26, 1992
  13. ^ "When Left reaches Right." The Washington Post. August 16, 1977.
  14. ^ Eringer, Robert. "The Force of Willis Carto." Mother Jones 6 (April 1981): 6.
  15. ^ U.S. Supreme Court Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242 (1986)
  16. ^ "Willis A. Carto: Fabricating History". Anti-Defamation League. Retrieved 2008-11-17. The Spotlight announced in August 1994 that Liberty Lobby was launching a new publication devoted to historical revisionism called The Barnes Review (after the 20th century revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes). {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
  • Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
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