The Nationalist White Party
In baseball they have a rule that says: three strikes and you’re out. I had now struck out three times. But did I stay down and out? Not by a damn site. I had tried to do something within the framework of the Republican Party and found out that they were really in cahoots with the Democrats in selling this country down the river. I had tried to support Gov. Wallace for the presidency and discovered that behind all the ballyhoo he was nothing but a real phony. I had tried to build a genuine Third Party in Florida and found that most of the members (not all) were cither blind to the Jewish control, or afraid to buck them, or worse still, were themselves agents provocateur of the Jewish conspiracy.
But nevertheless, I kept on searching for answers. For most of 1970, Austin and I looked into existing movements that might be genuine and worthwhile joining, but we had already checked out most of these earlier, as I related in MS Forty-four. We had researched and studied the Klan, Matt Kochl’s Nazi Party, Gerald L. K. Smith’s outfit, and a number of others, and found them completely inadequate. For a while we entertained the idea of supporting the National States Rights Party (they had by now moved to Marietta, Georgia) but they seemed more interested in promoting Christianity than in saving the White Race. A further search turned up nothing that seemed worthwhile. Finally, after my return from the European trip and after a considerable amount of soul searching, I came to the agonizing conclusion that if I were to operate within an organization that meant something, I would probably have to put it together myself. After much deliberation and a voluminous amount of discussion, Austin and I put an idea together that we felt reflected our total philosophy and something meaningful of which we could be proud. We called it The Nationalist White Party. Our creed and program was detailed in our “Fourteen Points.” Since these have already been spelled out in The Klassen Letters, Vol. I, (starting on P. 35) there is no need to repeat them here.
Whereas my most vociferous opposition in the AIP when I started exposing the Jewish conspiracy came from the Florida West Coast, now the most enthusiastic support came from a group in the same area. The leader of this group was a lovely young woman by the name of Eleanor Kramer, married to Rudi Kramer, who, when a boy had been a member of the Hitler Youth. However, of the two, Eleanor was by far the more dynamic and enthusiastic leader. Even before we had formed the NWP she came to visit us at our bookstore in Pompano Beach and applauded my stand against the Birch Society. She had found out about it through the grapevine, and she related to us that she had come to
the same conclusion, as had we. By November of 1970 we had the framework of our party pretty well put together, and since by now I was an “expert” at filing for a new corporation, we decided to incorporate our party. On November 3, we received our charter from the State of Florida. The Ft. Lauderdale News took note. In an article dated Nov. 18 and headed “Third Party’ Gets Charter”, it stated: Damning an alleged coalition of Blacks and Jews in American politics and finance, a new “third party” to pursue the interests of White Christians has been formed by two North Broward men – one a former Republican state legislator. The Nationalist White Party, with former state representative Bernard Klassen as its national director, recently was issued a charter as a nonprofit corporation by Florida Secretary of State Tom Adams. In addition to Klassen, Austin C. Davis was listed as assistant director of the party, which has its headquarters at 886 N. Federal Highway, Pompano Beach. Both men are Lighthouse Point residents. Klassen, who ran George Wallace’s presidential campaign in Broward in 1968, said the purpose of his new party would be to emphasize that “the White Christian people who conquered America don’t intend to be relegated to second-class citizenship. ” End of article. The Jews evidently also took note. Shortly after that article was published, a Jewish gal by the name of B. Jacobson lost no time denouncing us in a letter to the editor, which was headed “Hate and Lies.” The letter ended with a paragraph that said, “I personally pray that all thinking Americans reject the Nationalist White Party and its platform of hate and lies.”
In answer I wrote a letter that was published in the same paper on Dec. 20, in a caption that asked, “Why not White?”
It stated: “In a letter of Dec. 7 the writer launches a vitriolic attack on the Nationalist White Party apparently for no other reason than that we take a stand for the white race, and are tired of being relegated to second class citizenship in our own country. Evidently it is fine for the Jews to organize a multitude of organizations such as the A.D.L., A.J.C., the Kehilla, etc., all exclusively Jewish and all fanatically promoting the interests of the Jewish Race. It is regarded as a benevolent service to their race when negroes organize the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and a host of other organizations promoting solely the interests of the blacks. But, strangely, when an organization is formed dedicated to protecting
the interests of the white race, immediately the Jacobsons and their type spring into action and hurl accusations,insults and invectives at the White Christian people. It is further strange that the writer accused our platform of “hate and lies.” Since our platform is only now in the process of completion and the writer is totally ignorant of its contents, such words probably best reflect her own position, not ours. Our party is based on love for the white race, not hate, and formed to help protect our people from such outrages as forced busing, among many others.
Ben Klassen
National Director,
Nationalist White Party
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 London 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, 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.
* * * * *
Countess Guardabassi was a grand old dowager who lived in her stately mansion in Palm Beach. She had been the heiress to a 50 million dollar drugstore chain fortune, and although as American as apple pie, she had acquired her Countess title by marrying an Italian Count many years ago. The Count had long ago passed on into Nirvana, but the Countess and the title still remained. She was a staunch “conservative” and even hated the Jews with a passion. Although she had no clear-cut philosophy of her own, she would periodically invite well-known speakers to her mansion to talk to a select group of like-minded conservatives. Austin and I attended several such gatherings, and once or twice Henrie was also with us. Enter the General into this picture. During World War II Gen. P.A. del Valle was a military man of some renown, fighting the Jewish war in the Pacific, and in the process leading thousands of White young men to their deaths fighting to preserve Jewish “Democracy.” Comfortably retired on his generous pensions after the war, he became a notorious Kosher Konservative in the style of the Birch Society. He formed a post-office box organization called The Defenders of the American Constitution, Inc. From time to time he would give his song and dance speeches about God and Country, the Flag and the Constitution to various groups that would listen to him and pay his expenses. But never would he defend or patronize the White Race, nor would he ever mention the Jewish menace.
On April 4, 1971, he was giving one of his usual speeches at Countess Guardabassi’s mansion and Austin and I went to hear what he had to say. After the speech I went up to meet with him and gave him a copy of our “Fourteen Points”, along with an application and invitation to Join our NWP.
A few days later, April 7, I received a letter from him. He did not join us, but in a critical paragraph he said, “Another point I would like to know about refers to your membership application. Name, address, telephone number and national origin I understand. But Religious Affiliation (if any) puzzles me. Because no organization such as you propose should be open to non-Christians.” There was that damn Christianity Issue raising its ugly head again! I couldn’t understand it. I answered him in a long letter, dated April 13, in which I said, among other things, yes, indeedy, we were glad to welcome members whether they embraced Christianity or not. We had some further correspondence back and forth. I wrote him an even longer letter on April 26, and a final letter on May 12. All of these letters are printed
in full and can be read in The Klassen Letters, Vol. 1, and the story followed in more detail. In the second of these letters, namely mine of April 26, the germ of an idea cropped up that was to be the start of a long train of events to follow. That idea is spelled out on P.66, of K.L., Vol. 1, when I said, “General, what the White Race desperately needs is a new philosophy, in fact a new religion based upon the concepts of preserving the White Race, not a rehash of old Jewish shibboleths.”
The idea that the White Race needed a completely new religion to promote its own best interests grew within my mind. Not just a political party such as the NWP, but a complete, fundamentally new religion that established new moral values. The moral values we had been accepting and taking for granted were not ours – they were, as I had said, Jewish shibboleths. We needed moral values that reflected the heritage of our own great White Race, not that of the goddamned parasitic Jews. Where could I find such a religion? Much as I searched, there was none that I could find. Could I perhaps structure such a religion myself? I had my doubts.