When the Nazis Came to Town
When the Nazis Came to Town
The decent people of Coeur d'Alene didn't cower in the face of right-wing extremism. They fought back. Jeff Bezos and Mitch McConnell take note
I ARRANGED to meet two of America’s foremost Nazi slayers at 3 pm at the reception of the Best Western Plus in Coeur d’Alene and arrived almost an hour late which drove me insane because the way I see it other than being a Nazi the worst thing a person can be in this world is late.
What made matters worse was that I was late for two people - two first-round ballot, cast-iron, 24-carat Civil Rights Hall of Fame heroes - who should not under any circumstances have been left to twiddle their thumbs in the lobby of a mid-price commuter hotel. Tony Stewart and Norm Gissel are long-time stalwarts of an outfit called the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations and in that capacity had a remarkable story to tell about their community and how it rid itself of the Aryan Nations, a virulently racist, Hitler-loving organisation that promulgated the twin evils of white supremacy and anti-semitism while also embracing violence as a tool of political debate. This may or may not, and I will leave you to work it out, have some resonance with what is currently going on in these great United States of Did YouSee That F*ing Rally in New York Last Night?
But before Tony and Norm told me their story I had a story of my own to tell.
“I am soooooo sorry,’’ I began. “No excuses but … ”
It took me nine brain-numbing hours to find my way to Coeur d’Alene, up through the desert of northern Nevada, the unloveliest and most boring of the American deserts, which is quite a claim to fame in a landmass that includes California’’s Central Valley, along the narrow, snaking roads of Oregon and Washington State and back into Oregon, where insane truck drivers out-number sane truck drivers a thousand-to-one. Fortunately, I survived these 20-ton madmen to finally reach civilisation, also known as Spokane. From there, it was a short hop over the state border into Coeur d’Alene, a town with a jaw-dropping lakeside setting and a toxic relationship with Google Maps. I’m not exaggerating (okay, I am a little) but I took 14 wrong turns, at least nine of them down a one-way street into oncoming traffic, before I spotted the promised land of the Best Western Plus signage on the other side of the I-90.
You know how your eyes glazed over halfway through that last paragraph? That’s exactly how Tony and Norm reacted, too.
Being late and a boring storyteller is not the way to get the best out of interview subjects, even I know that, so I set my brain to ‘ingratiate’ and gave it my best shot.
“But my God, Coeur d’Alene is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. No wonder Richard Butler decided to move here.”
Norm looked like he had indigestion. Tony checked his watch.
“Shall we go through and get a seat in a cafe?”
SERIOUSLY, though, there’s no joking around when it comes to Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations. The guy was an evil bastard and his organisation was a shit stain on America. It still is, albeit these days it’s hard to work out where one violent white supremacist outfit ends and another begins. It’s not even clear the Aryan Nations still exists, although its Christofascist ideology is woven through every thread of an insidious national patchwork. For instance, the Hitler admiration ‘thing’ is to be found in all kinds of unexpected places, like mid-town Manhattan.
Butler was born in Denver in the early 1920s. He made his way to fascism early, through subliminally anti-communist comic books and overtly racist parents. “In the newsreels of the day, I was thrilled to see the movies of the marching Germans,” he recalled a half-century later. “In those days, all we knew was that Hitler hated communists, and so did my folks — as we did as teenagers.”
We needn’t waste time on Butler’s descent into madness and evil, I promise you, although if you really insist try this for size - the guy sincerely believed that Jews were descended from a marriage between Eve and the devil. Honestly, I spent a grand total of 10 minutes reading about this nitwit and feel like I’ve contracted incurable scurvy. One marginally interesting thing about him was he invented a repair system for tubeless tires and made a fortune, more than enough to retire and buy a 20-acre plot of land in a place called Hyden, just north of Coeur d’Alene.
Butler, his family and a coterie of disciples built a church on the property and a print shop producing anti-semitic - and at this point I would like to assert my First Amendment right to not use the word literature - garbage, which they distributed across the country. They called themselves the Aryan Nations. Occasionally, this motley crew would venture into town to hand out pamphlets and show off their ridiculous faux Nazi uniforms. There’s a famous photograph of one of these visits in which Richard Butler is sitting on a garden chair placed on the bed of a white truck, flanked by four numpties (it’s a Scottish word, look it up). Nuremberg, it was not.
Norm was around town at the time. I asked him what the locals felt when they saw this parade of unconscionables. “Not a lot, obviously, but no one paid much attention to them. This part of the world has always attracted cranks, you know, unusual people with unusual lifestyles. You ignored them and just hoped they’d go away.”
The Aryan Nations did not go away. The commune grew bigger and bolder until one night in late December 1980 they drove into town and daubed a Jewish-owned restaurant with the Star of David and the German word Jude. “That’s when we really knew we had a problem, that it wasn’t just a bunch of cranks on the hillside and we had to do something about it,” Tony Stewart recalled.
A few months later the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations was formed and a near two-decade battle ensued between Civil Rights activists like Stewart and Gissel and the American Nazis. Famously, a local sheriff and Task Force member called Larry Broadbent discovered the existence of an Aryan Nations off-shoot called The Order, which had been responsible for multiple serious crimes in California, including bank robbery, counterfeiting money, and plotting to poison the public water supply. Working on Boradbent’s information, the FBI broke up The Order and eventually got to its leader Robert Matthews, an associate of Richard Butler, killing him in a shoot-out in neighboring Washington.
Gissel, a lawyer by profession, helped track down and prosecute the Aryan Nations members who bombed the home of a local Catholic priest and fellow Civil Rights activist Bill Wassmuth and three government buildings in the town. “The only problem with that was they had organised the bombings outside of Richard Butler’s presence and without his knowledge, so far as anyone knew, which meant we couldn’t get him,’’ Gissel said, sounding more than a little p-ed off at missing out on getting the main man before he could cause even more carnage.
Tony Stewart chipped in with a beautifully understated description of that moment in time. “There was no love lost between us and the Nazis.”
“That’s right,’’ said Norm. “We all knew they wanted to kill us, that they would gladly have opened up the door and thrown in a canister of Zyklon B gas and closed the door behind us.”
“Correct,’’ said Tony. “One time in the middle of the night I got a message on my phone. It was just the sound of someone firing off a machine gun. A few days later there was a verbal message - someone telling me they were coming to kill me, that they were going to cut my head off and mail it to the Anti-Defamation League in New York.”
Norm had rocks thrown through the windows of his home, causing him to move the family out for a couple of weeks. “At the time, the Nazis thought they were in the political ascendancy and getting stronger but that’s not how we saw things. We just saw our role as doing everything we could to diminish their political and cultural significance in our town. Because that’s all you can legally do when it comes to people you vehemently disagree with.”
Listening to Tony and Norm playing ‘Nazi threats ping-pong’ I honestly wanted to hug the pair of them, both now in their 70s, both brave and strong and true to everything good that America stands for. Not to get too preachy or, perish the thought, judgemental but if Tony Stewart and not Mitch McConnell had been GOP senate leader in January 2021 Donald Trump’s fat arse would have been impeached right out of the White House. If Norm Gissel and not Jeff Bezos had been the owner of the Washington Post this past weekend you can bet your life the paper would have endorsed a candidate for this Presidential election and it wouldn’t have been Donald Trump or either cheek of his fat arse. It is somewhat ironic … check … entirely predictable that the so-called titans of American public life with the most power and money have cowered in the face of right-wing extremism, while ‘ordinary folks’ like Tony Stewart and Norm Gissel refused to step back and have always done the right thing on behalf of the community to which they belong. It’s what strong and decent leaders do.
By the way, when I said I wasn’t going to be too preachy, I lied. It’s all the rage these days, apparently.
THE Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations got Butler in the end, although it took them until 1998. Two of his henchmen/thugs attacked local woman Victoria Keenan and her son Jason after their car back-fired near the Aryan Nations compound. Victoria phoned a lawyer called - you guessed - Norm Gissel. And Norm Gissel - you’re damn right he did - got to work. “They chased the Keenans’ car for two miles and shot at them five times, with one bullet passing right between the driver and the passenger seats. They eventually put a bullet through a tire and forced them off the road,’’ he said.
A team of lawyers was assembled by the Task Force and the Keenans sued Butler, the Aryan Nations and the attackers for civil damages. In September 2000 a jury awarded Victoria and Jason $6.3 million in damages.
Butler and co didn’t have that amount of money so the Keenans’ lawyers took great pleasure in cleaning them out for everything they had, including the land where Aryan Nations had been based for more than 25 years. Mother and son were now the reluctant owners of a Nazi compound although fortunately not for long. “A good friend of ours who was extremely rich came in and bought the land from the Keenans, who at least got some of their money. We then hired a company to destroy everything that had been built inside the compound, flatten the whole lot to the ground and we called it a Peace park,’’ Tony Stewart said.
Coeur d’Alene was finally rid of Richard Butler, even if his toxic ideology persists in some measure. There have been a few incidents in recent years, most of them involving outsiders who are under the mistaken impression that Coeur d’Alene holds a special place in the mythology of American nazism when in fact the town holds a special place in the reality of the great American Civil Rights movement.
“ Look at the Klan, which goes back to the 1860s. The fact is people like Butler and the stuff they talk about has been a persistent part of American history for decades,’’ Norm Gissel said. “It goes up and down and up again through the years but the truth is it never fully goes away. We just have to stay vigilant”
Actually, now that you mention it, Norm.
THERE is no plaque on Rimrock Road to mark a great American civil rights victory but there is a real live 21st century American Nazi. I went looking for the site of Richard Butler’s former compound - it was once here on this street and I wanted a photograph of whatever was there now - and found a fellow traveler of his instead. That’s the thing about this country nowadays. It’s full of terrible surprises.
Will - which is not his real name - was burning garden waste on a Sunday morning in northern Idaho. He was sitting on his John Deere, admiring the bonfire he had lit. I was a long way from nowhere and had a question so I pulled off the road and gave him a wave.
He was pleased to see me, as most people are when they hear the accent. “Scotland?” he said.
I was impressed. Not many people get it right the first time.
We talked about the weather, which was perfect in that flaxen autumnal way, and the bonfire, which was beginning to subside. “You should have been here earlier. It was really something,'“ he said. “What’s your cell phone number? I’ll send you a photograph.”
We chatted about his previous life. He moved up from southern California after he reached retirement age, bought five acres of land for cheap and built his beautiful house pretty much with his own hands. He was eyeing a parcel of land across the street with the intention of raising bison. Tasty meat and lots of it. There were no regrets. It could get pretty bleak in the winters but the rewards more than made up for that. Had I ever seen the Northern Lights? He would send me a photograph taken right from this very spot.
I gave him my number and got to my point. “I was just wondering about Kamala Harris sign pinned to the fence back up the road there. Is that yours?”
Well, wouldn’t you know, it might be time to launch a career in stand-up.
Will responded with a tea-spraying laugh and then got to his point. “I’m a 3%-er.”
Stop me if you have heard something like this before but the “3%-ers” are an informal group of right-wing militia who believe the US government is intent on stripping away the constitutional rights and liberties of all God-fearing American citizens. They are preparing for a civil war that will replace the existing tyranny with something else, the details of which will be provided at a later date. They hate black people, Jews, Muslims and anyone else who doesn’t look and feel like them - ie. white, angry and heavily armed.
I’d heard of the 3%-ers but meeting one out in the wild was somewhat disconcerting and not a little scary, a bit like finding an alligator in the bathtub.
“So you’ll be voting for Trump?”
Will didn’t look impressed. “I suppose,’’ he said. ‘But it won’t matter either way.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter who wins it’s gonna end up in the same place.”
Uh-oh
“If Trump wins then Antifa and Black Lives Matter and all the other communists will take to the streets, in which case we are ready and waiting to take care of business. If she wins, then it’s obvious they will have cheated and we will have to go out on the streets to win back the country. We’re ready for it.”
Ready?
“We were out on night ops last night,’’ he said.
That was it for me, thank you very much. I bid Will a fond farewell and did my best Usain Bolt impression back to the car, anything to avoid being invited into his house to admire his collection of 51 guns (true story) and my potential role as a Lance Corporal in the Scottish Division of his man-child fantasy army. I felt like a coward but that’s okay because I am a coward, especially when measured against giants like Norm Gissel and Tony Stewart.
Even now I can picture Norm reading about this encounter and thinking to himself, “I’m going to sue that Nazi bastard for not having a permit to light a bonfire in his garden on a Sunday morning.” Tony Stewart has probably got a town hall meeting and a protest march already on the books. Not me, no sir. All I can think about is I gave my cell phone number to American Nazi and he’s already texted me with those photographs he promised to send.
Dear heavens😳 The purple you meet.
"He seemed like such a nice, normal person"... isn't that what the neighbours always say when someone does something unbelievably awful?
I admire your friendly openness. You didn’t know he was a crank when you gave him your number.
Now he has more to fear from you than you do from him. He may have your number, but now you have his. FBI needs to hear from you.