by George Lincoln Rockwell

CHAPTER I.

At first we thought the riot had been called off. It was a hot, Sunday afternoon, July third, 1960.

The week before, June 26th, the Director of the National Capital Parks of the Department of the Interior had called me and sent me, by special messenger, an official letter of urgent warning. He told us that the Department had so much information of violence and riots planned against us that he was "not sure" he could protect us with his police force. He suggested that we give up speaking or move out of town. When I firmly but respectfully refused, he asked me to withdraw the Troopers I had been keeping in the crowd to heckle the hecklers to keep the crowd from cohering into a riotous and dangerous mob.

We, too, had been receiving more than the usual amount of filthy telephoned threats that this time they would "beat the -- out of us", etc. I had therefore painted a huge sign for our speaking stand warning the crowd that "certain" groups were planning to riot in order to put an end to our speaking. I had complied with the police request that we pull our Troopers out of the crowd -- as we always obey all reasonable police requests.

But there had been no riot on the twenty-sixth. We had twenty-five of our men on hand, all behind the roped enclosure, and were more than ready for them if they burst through the ropes at us, no matter how many they were, or how tough.

They came to this rally, all right! Let no one say that the Jews are a race of nothing but sickly moneylenders and feeble clerks. There were two or three hundred big, husky, mean-looking Jews who screamed curses and milled around. Some spit at us, but they did not attack. For almost two hours I managed to outshout their heckling and completed my speech by sheer force of will and power of voice.

This week of July third, we felt the worst danger was over. We had faced their mob of hoods and bullies the week before and had left the field victorious. it seemed doubtful they would try again so soon.

The rolling mall between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument was warm and brilliantly green in the hot July sunshine as our convoy of cars and trucks drove up with our Troops and equipment. The police were there in force, with their mounted men hidden behind the building, as usual; the police dogs locked in their special little van and their squad cars and patrol wagons lined up beside the Smithsonian Museum. But only a few dozen people were in front of our roped-off speaking enclosure.

I sat down under a tree to one side and watched as my lads unloaded the heavy stand from the convoy, set it up and attached the bunting and banners. A few of our fans came over and talked with me or offered me cold drinks. Everything seemed peaceful In fact, it was too peaceful. Major Morgan, my Deputy Commander, on whom I depended as an experienced and utterly capable Storm Leader, had asked for the day off and had even come down to the scene in civvies with his pregnant wife to enjoy, for once, the case of a spectator. Only eleven of our men had been able to show up at this rally, after the all-out effort of the week before.

But now, I could sense something different, something wrong. As the crowd began to gather, the police did a strange thing: they all but disappeared. They retreated over a hundred yards beyond the crowd and there were only one or two uniformed men anywhere within operating distance of the enclosure!

I mounted the platform when the boys were ready. Then I knew what was going on. Like a hoard of locusts, almost in military formation, over two hundred of last week's burly Jew hoodlums and toughs swarmed around our stand and began an obviously organized chant of "Sick! Sick! Sick!". This was not too surprising, but what happened next was horrifying. The Jews began to push and hang over the ropes and swing at our men, and the police retreated even farther away with folded arms!

When I say it was horrifying, I do not mean that what the Jews were doing was horrifying. We expected them to try to kill us, if they thought they could and we were prepared to teach them the error of this method. But it must be remembered that to survive, we have to bend over backward to be legal. The minute the Jews can show that we have violated the law or even appear to have violated the law, they can bring more than enough pressure to have us stowed away and silenced. We must depend on the police to uphold the law, since we are forbidden to defend ourselves even fairly, by violence, much as we sometimes ache to do.

When the police suddenly 'couldn't see' the most gross attacks on us, we knew that an honest police department had finally succumbed to intolerable Jewish pressure, and we were in for whatever the Jews could work up their courage to do. For over an hour and a half, I managed to hold the howling, spitting mob by arrogance and psychologically -- calculated disdain for their overwhelming numbers. To say that we were not afraid would be untruthful, for we were only eleven and they were over two hundred and fifty, plus the fact that our whole future, all our struggles and sacrifices for over two years were lying in the balance. It was obvious that they were determined to have their riot this day and then claim that we had to be suppressed for 'causing' such disorder.

Nevertheless, it took those Jews over an hour and a half to work up the courage to rush us and even then, they thinned our number first by having one big Trooper called out by falsely telling military police he was a Marine, thus reducing our number to ten.

In they rushed, like an avalanche of wild beasts, screaming and howling for my guts! The stand flew over as the Jews struck and I landed in a struggling mass of fighting men. Two yelling Jews grabbed me. One of my men, already down and fighting desperately, grabbed his feet and he went down. But the other Jew aimed a blow at my groin. I hit him in the head and, as he fell, another Trooper tackled him. How my boys pitched in! But the Jew still went for the same attack on me. This time, I replied in kind and gave that Jew a dose of his own medicine!

The fight lasted for only four or five minutes, after which the police rushed in from where they had been hiding and broke it up. Major Morgan was choked unconscious, was bleeding profusely and had his right knee permanently damaged by a number of kicks he received when he was under a pile of seven or eight Jews. Lieutenant Warner, National Secretary of the Party at the time, had the top of his left ear bitten almost off and all of us were cut and bruised. We later discovered that one of the large men who had recently joined us and loudly boasted how he would fight -- Fred Hockett, by name -- had run out of the ring in terror when the fight began, so that we had only nine men there to fight that murderous mob.

And we showed the Jews the caliber of those nine men when the police broke up the fight -- for we immediately set up our stand and were prepared to speak. I mounted the platform again, broken and wrecked as it was, and would have spoken, but police called me down and I was arrested for "disorderly conduct". For the first time in my life, I found myself dragged off to jail, and as I sat in a cell awaiting bail, it was impossible not to think back on the chain of circumstances which had placed me here in the ugly, urine-smelling cellblock of the First Precinct of Washington, D.C.

How does an American who fought the Nazis in World War II, who has a college education and is utterly dedicated to his country, wind up in jail after being attacked by a mob of Jews? How does a man who was looked upon for years as just a 'good guy', become a fanatical Nazi who stands up in public and advocates gas chambers for Jewish or any other kinds of traitors -- and admits he estimates about 80% of adult Jews will be found guilty of treason and have to be gassed? Why me? How had events turned me into such a one, but few or none of my fellows? Was I indeed 'nuts' and 'sick' as the Jews so feverishly insist?

That I was somehow different from most of my fellows seemed obvious, but how? Was I really a moral snake full of pathological hate, as charged by the 'normal' Jews or could I lay a valid claim to the apparently inevitable persecution of every advanced idea and of every truly great man Nature has produced in thousands of years. Why had I gone down to that mall to speak, knowing I might be killed or injured or arrested, knowing I would gain no money or even praise, except from a tiny few of my fellow 'oddballs'? Was my brother right when he charged that I would not do these things if I had a fine home and a yacht? Was I one of the disgusting dead-end fanatics I had seen in parks, shouting eternally some idee fixe through whiskers stained with tobacco juice, at more of the same pitiful creatures impatiently waiting only their turn to fulminate on nothing? Was I compensating for some unknown traumatic experience as a kid, as the Freudians would have it?

Sitting alone in the nasty little cell, I thought back over my life and tried to discover a pattern, some clue to my motivation in going down to that mall to speak for what seemed a lost cause and in the face of what seemed the violent opposition of the whole world.

I remembered an experience in 1928, when I was ten, in Ventnor, New Jersey, just south of Atlantic City, where I was living with my mother and her sister. A gang of kid toughs my brother and I called "the bums" came to throw me into the ocean for a cold dunking -- a treatment which the boys often received as 'new kids' in the school. I remembered being counseled by a few of the more friendly boys to "relax" and be thrown in and get it over with. It was "impossible," they said, to resist, since half the school was in on the fun and nobody ever took the part of the chosen victim. But the thought of calmly letting anybody or any number of people do violence to me and force me something roused a nameless counter force in me. It was not just temper, because I remember being scared to death and later on, crying. But, since they had told me it was "impossible" to resist, I was determined to resist with all my might -- and that is what I did.

After the experiences of two wars I still remember that battle on the deserted beach in Ventnor. I flung about me with my arms and legs wildly and with a superhuman strength which I am sure surprised the 'bums' and, though there were at least twenty or thirty of them, those who could get near, enough to get a hold of me received some blows and wounds which I am sure must have hurt. I bit, clawed, kicked, tore and pulled hair. I used any tactic I could, without thinking and fought like a mad man. I can still remember the 'bums' generals' cursing at their 'troops': "Hold his leg! Get his neck! Look out! @t&%**! Watch out for that arm," etc. I can also remember vividly the satisfying feeling of the flesh in my teeth as my jaws closed on the arm of one who was attempting to choke me into submission and his even more satisfying howl of pain. Then I remembered getting some kicks and being dropped on the beach and lying in the sand, crying and exhausted. But I did not get thrown in the surf by the 'bums'. I remembered, with some shame, going to school the next day and getting beaten in a regular fist fight with one of the toughs, who still smarted from the defeat on the beach. I ran home crying.

I considered the two episodes and, for the first time since those occurrences, more than thirty years ago, wondered why I had managed to fight all those kids and win -- and then get beaten by just one of them the next day. My answer was, I believe, the key to everything I have ever done in my life.

I have little interest in the ordinary, the usual, and above all, what is considered by the world 'possible'. But when I am faced with an enormous challenge, I become not only deeply interested, but my strength seems to increase beyond my own powers. I have in every such case prevailed over the supposedly 'impossible'. I am often lazy and shiftless in the ordinary affairs of life which demand no special will or intelligence. My relatives and wives will amply attest this miserable character which produces the utmost personal discomfort in daily living, not only for me, but for those who must live with me.

I found it was extremely easy in school for me to outwit and cozen my teachers, so that I could get by with almost no work. I simply could not get interested in subjects and activities which did not offer me a direct challenge, a dare. I therefore coasted along on as little work as would keep me out of too great a conflict with the forces which ordinarily press boys to succeed in school and devoted all my energies solely to trying to exceed the limits of what my masters said were the 'Possibilities'. In algebra, I worked for many, many hours trying to find a way to solve a single equation with two unknowns. Needless to say, I failed. But in geometry, they told me that if two triangles had a side and two angles the same, they were congruent -- and I proved to the teacher that this was not always the case. I enjoyed a deep gratification at thus accomplishing 'the impossible'. What a pebble I was in the shoe of education on the march!

Later, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, with my father, I discovered the same pattern with my sports and recreational activity. I became a sailing fan, even though I had to build my own sailboat out of an old skiff. But I didn't enjoy sailing like most of the others. They all rushed to their boats when the weather was fine, the breeze brisk, but not strong and everything was 'normal'. And then they stayed mostly within the confines of the harbor itself. I found little pleasure in this after a while. I preferred to go out only when the others came in because the wind was 'too strong'. I delighted in beating the elements, the worse they got. I remember one hair-raising trip around Southport Island, where my brother, a reluctant passenger, crouched in the sloshing water of the bilge of the little boat and prayed fervently and miserably as the spume and green water poured over him. I was afraid, of course, but the pure joy of combat with the wild elements had me singing and even howling back at the wild wind with animal energy. My brother begged for mercy, which I could not understand, although I feel sorry for him now. He must have thought me mad and hated me -- which he assured me he did.

When even this activity palled a bit, I essayed a trip to Pemaquid, far out at sea for such a tiny boat, with another young man of similar tastes. We made history on that trip by negotiating the Threads of Life -- a torturous rock passage -- at night, against the wind and against a terrible rip tide.

My friend, Eden Lewis and I took turns fending off catastrophe from the bow of the tossing craft as we tacked back and forth, only inches from the jagged rocks, with the wind howling against us and the tide spinning us around most fearfully in the inky blackness. The continual splash of the cold, dark waters in our faces would have added to the general effect of horror, had we not been rash youths. How we both enjoyed it! And, even more, how we enjoyed the warm feeling of success and mastery when we reached our warm fire-sides, soaked, exhausted, but exulting in our 'impossible' victory!

I discover pretty much the same pattern in my emotional life. I cannot abide 'pick-ups' or 'easy women', which caused me to be a good deal of an odd ball in the service, particularly when I was very young, as one might imagine. I am intrigued only by exceptional females who require something more subtle than physical overpowering.

In short, I am now fairly certain that the driving force in my life is a deep satisfaction in defying any overwhelming odds which seem to press against that which I will. In ordinary affairs, when there is no such challenge, I not only do not excel -- I am a positive flop. I cannot work up any real interest in having the best rock-garden in South Podunk, for instance and those things in life which depend upon being a dedicated cultivator of rock-gardens or similar normal accomplishments find me trailing happily at the rear.

On the other hand, in addition to this positive motivation for my activities, there is a negative hate -- a burning hate which alone can drive me to lose my temper, a thing I almost never do. Bullying -- the beating or torturing of an innocent or helpless creature by an overpowering creature or group of creatures, for the sheer pleasure of bullying and torture, drives me to a frenzy such that it is difficult to control myself.

The combination of these two overpowering drives from deep within me, I believe, are the underlying motivations which sent me down to the mail, wearing a Swastika armband, ready to die, if necessary and dumped me, for the moment, in the smelly little cell in the basement of the Washington, D.C., Police Headquarters. I believe the same two characteristics, applied at this crucial and precise time in history, will propel me and our Nazi movement from that jail cell, up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The world's longest half-mile!