Klassen Letters Volume One
The Nationalist White Party (1970-1971)
Sometime in February of 1971 Jim Guler, political columnist for the Ft. Lauderdale News, came to interview me at my office in Pompano Beach. In an article published in the Sunday edition, Feb. 21, 1971, of the combined Ft. Lauderdale News and the Pompano Beach Sun Sentinel, he wrote an article about the Nationalist White Party. The heading was "NWP is to the Right of Wallace." Above the main heading was a sub-heading that said "Ben Klassen Leads Party." The article continued with the following text:
There is a law in physics that declares for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The same is true, of course, in politics. Push the pendulum too hard in one direction and it comes flying back at you.
Seeking an answer to what it saw as a "Communist conspiracy" in the past decade was the right-wing John Birch Society.
George Wallace and the American Independent Party rose up against the liberal extremes of the Lyndon Johnson administration.
A patchwork of "New Left" organizations have taken to the streets to criticize the fighting in Indochina as an "immoral war."
The Americans for Constitutional Action is the ultra-conservative counterpart to the ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action.
And with the emergence of the Black Panther Party, a small band of black revolutionaries more dedicated to bullets than ballots, it was probably inevitable that we would see the formation of a Nationalist White Party at the other end of the philosophical spectrum.
The Nationalist White Party (NWP), given its state charter last fall, is the creation of a former Republican state legislator who left the John Birch Society because he felt it was sliding to the left.
Ben Klassen, the national director, who helped run Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign in Broward County, said the purpose of his party would be to emphasize that "the White Christian people who built American don't intend to be relegated to second-class citizenship. "
"Jews control most of the finances and the media, and with the Negroes, wield political power far in excess of their numbers," Klassen charges. "Despite the fact the white Christian people outnumber Jews 30-1, the political power is predominantly anti-white, pro-Jew and pro-black. "
He says it is his belief "the white Christians are tired of being pushed around, looted and plundered by an overwhelming tax structure so that millions of blacks can live on welfare, breed and multiply indiscriminately and create more and more freeloaders to further burden already overburdened working whites."
It is his party's intent, he adds, to make race a basic issue in political elections, and to confront candidates with the choice of representing "white Christian people on the one hand or Jews and blacks on the other."
Another aim of the party, Klassen adds, is to instill "racial loyalty" among whites while "uniting them the same as our opponents always have done (among themselves)".
Klassen was elected to the State House of Representatives in 1966 as a Republican, but was unseated three months later when he tried for the State Senate in the special election. He left the GOP, calling it a tool of the "ultra-liberal Eastern establishment" and later bolted the Wallace team because of Wallace's moderating views on segregation.
"Wallace has weakened his stand on segregation over the past eight years," Klassen explains. "In his first inaugural speech, he pledged 'segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.' But in his recent inaugural address, he didn't mention segregation once."
Where, we should now ask, does the pendulum swing from here?
It was at this time that I designed our logo or insignia, which later became the logo of the Church of the Creator. I first of all drew up the design, and then turned my sketch over to a commercial artist, a fellow in Pompano Beach that I knew from our Chamber of Commerce meetings, although I can't now recall his name. As I do recall, however, he only charged us a paltry $9.00.
By February and March of 1971 we finally had our act together and were going strong. We had our Fourteen Points, our logo, and other literature printed in mass, and we were signing up dues paying members. In this matter we didn't exactly start from scratch. I had a number of loyal followers that were with me in the JBS, in my campaign for the legislature, in the Wallace movement, in the Citizens Councils and also in the AIP. And now we also had the new group from the West Coast that was headed by Eleanor Kramer.
We held regular meetings of the NWP at the bookstore. I also made a few trips to the Tampa area and gave speeches to those members on the West Coast. We soon had about 40 members.
Things seemed to be going pretty well, but I began to notice a certain irritant and aggravation intruding into our meetings that baffled me. At just about every meeting there would be some fellow, or some little old lady in tennis shoes, who would get up and harp about the Christianity issue. They would say something like this: "My Savior was a Jew. I can't go against the Jews!" Or, "My bible says that we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. Isn't it wrong therefore to be against Jews and blacks?" Another ploy was, "My bible says about the Jews, I will bless them that bless thee and I will curse them that curse thee, sayeth the Lord. How can we possibly oppose the Jews?" I would try to brush off such intrusions and remind them that this was a political party and they could have any religious beliefs they wanted to, but we should not drag them into our political movement. But these kind of disruptions continued. Some even insisted that we should include in our Fourteen Points that this country was founded as a Christian nation. Furthermore, we should make it clear that our party was a Christian party and we adhered to Christian principles. I regret to say that I had inadvertently encouraged this position by repeatedly using the term "White Christian" in much of my literature and in my letters. I had stupidly made the mistake of taking for granted that "Christian" and "White" were almost synonymous, when in reality they were terms that were in bitter conflict, and in complete contradiction to each other. Equating the two terms "White'' and "Christian", is a treacherous confusion that Dr. Ed Field's NSRP is still perpetrating on the gullible yokels to this very day.
The Christianity issue was soon to come to a head.
The Nationalist White Party (1970-1971)
Sometime in February of 1971 Jim Guler, political columnist for the Ft. Lauderdale News, came to interview me at my office in Pompano Beach. In an article published in the Sunday edition, Feb. 21, 1971, of the combined Ft. Lauderdale News and the Pompano Beach Sun Sentinel, he wrote an article about the Nationalist White Party. The heading was "NWP is to the Right of Wallace." Above the main heading was a sub-heading that said "Ben Klassen Leads Party." The article continued with the following text:
There is a law in physics that declares for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The same is true, of course, in politics. Push the pendulum too hard in one direction and it comes flying back at you.
Seeking an answer to what it saw as a "Communist conspiracy" in the past decade was the right-wing John Birch Society.
George Wallace and the American Independent Party rose up against the liberal extremes of the Lyndon Johnson administration.
A patchwork of "New Left" organizations have taken to the streets to criticize the fighting in Indochina as an "immoral war."
The Americans for Constitutional Action is the ultra-conservative counterpart to the ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action.
And with the emergence of the Black Panther Party, a small band of black revolutionaries more dedicated to bullets than ballots, it was probably inevitable that we would see the formation of a Nationalist White Party at the other end of the philosophical spectrum.
The Nationalist White Party (NWP), given its state charter last fall, is the creation of a former Republican state legislator who left the John Birch Society because he felt it was sliding to the left.
Ben Klassen, the national director, who helped run Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign in Broward County, said the purpose of his party would be to emphasize that "the White Christian people who built American don't intend to be relegated to second-class citizenship. "
"Jews control most of the finances and the media, and with the Negroes, wield political power far in excess of their numbers," Klassen charges. "Despite the fact the white Christian people outnumber Jews 30-1, the political power is predominantly anti-white, pro-Jew and pro-black. "
He says it is his belief "the white Christians are tired of being pushed around, looted and plundered by an overwhelming tax structure so that millions of blacks can live on welfare, breed and multiply indiscriminately and create more and more freeloaders to further burden already overburdened working whites."
It is his party's intent, he adds, to make race a basic issue in political elections, and to confront candidates with the choice of representing "white Christian people on the one hand or Jews and blacks on the other."
Another aim of the party, Klassen adds, is to instill "racial loyalty" among whites while "uniting them the same as our opponents always have done (among themselves)".
Klassen was elected to the State House of Representatives in 1966 as a Republican, but was unseated three months later when he tried for the State Senate in the special election. He left the GOP, calling it a tool of the "ultra-liberal Eastern establishment" and later bolted the Wallace team because of Wallace's moderating views on segregation.
"Wallace has weakened his stand on segregation over the past eight years," Klassen explains. "In his first inaugural speech, he pledged 'segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.' But in his recent inaugural address, he didn't mention segregation once."
Where, we should now ask, does the pendulum swing from here?
It was at this time that I designed our logo or insignia, which later became the logo of the Church of the Creator. I first of all drew up the design, and then turned my sketch over to a commercial artist, a fellow in Pompano Beach that I knew from our Chamber of Commerce meetings, although I can't now recall his name. As I do recall, however, he only charged us a paltry $9.00.
By February and March of 1971 we finally had our act together and were going strong. We had our Fourteen Points, our logo, and other literature printed in mass, and we were signing up dues paying members. In this matter we didn't exactly start from scratch. I had a number of loyal followers that were with me in the JBS, in my campaign for the legislature, in the Wallace movement, in the Citizens Councils and also in the AIP. And now we also had the new group from the West Coast that was headed by Eleanor Kramer.
We held regular meetings of the NWP at the bookstore. I also made a few trips to the Tampa area and gave speeches to those members on the West Coast. We soon had about 40 members.
Things seemed to be going pretty well, but I began to notice a certain irritant and aggravation intruding into our meetings that baffled me. At just about every meeting there would be some fellow, or some little old lady in tennis shoes, who would get up and harp about the Christianity issue. They would say something like this: "My Savior was a Jew. I can't go against the Jews!" Or, "My bible says that we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. Isn't it wrong therefore to be against Jews and blacks?" Another ploy was, "My bible says about the Jews, I will bless them that bless thee and I will curse them that curse thee, sayeth the Lord. How can we possibly oppose the Jews?" I would try to brush off such intrusions and remind them that this was a political party and they could have any religious beliefs they wanted to, but we should not drag them into our political movement. But these kind of disruptions continued. Some even insisted that we should include in our Fourteen Points that this country was founded as a Christian nation. Furthermore, we should make it clear that our party was a Christian party and we adhered to Christian principles. I regret to say that I had inadvertently encouraged this position by repeatedly using the term "White Christian" in much of my literature and in my letters. I had stupidly made the mistake of taking for granted that "Christian" and "White" were almost synonymous, when in reality they were terms that were in bitter conflict, and in complete contradiction to each other. Equating the two terms "White'' and "Christian", is a treacherous confusion that Dr. Ed Field's NSRP is still perpetrating on the gullible yokels to this very day.
The Christianity issue was soon to come to a head.
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