FOR FINAL/DEFINITIVE VERSION SEE: Aaron Winter (2011), ‘Louis Beam Jr.’, Religion and Violence: An Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict, ed. J. I. Ross, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 99-103. Louis Beam Jr. Aaron Winter, University of Abertay Louis Ray Beam Jr., a former Klansman and member of Aryan Nations whose aliases included Turner Ashby, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Ken Harrison, Robert Johnson, Travis Wilkerson, “Calvary [sic] General” and “Lonestar” (Beam, 1987, p. 8), was a racist, anti-Semitic and anti-communist white separatist with a history of advocating violence. If there is any individual who represented and influenced the transition from the civil rights era Klan of the 1950s and 1960s to the post-civil rights era extreme right of the 1970s to the 1990s, it was Beam. The most common analysis of this transition is that the majority of the Klan and wider extreme right underwent a process of radicalization in the 1970s and 1980s, rejecting hegemonic state-supportive ideologies and electoral activism in favor of anti-government ideologies, paramilitarization and political violence. Nothing articulates this transformation as well as Beam’s own moniker and call to arms, which stated, “where ballots fail, bullets will prevail” (Ridgeway, 1990). More directly, Beam’s influence can be seen in several significant developments, including the paramilitarization of the Klan in the 1970s, anti-government patriotism over state-supportive patriotism, the popularization of Christian Identity (a racial-national religion and theology based on British-Israelism which holds that the Aryan race are God’s chosen people and the true Israelites) over the traditional Protestant Christianity of the Klan, the advocacy of white separatism over white supremacy and white nationalism in the 1980s, as well as the development of the ‘Leaderless Resistance’ combat strategy and emergence of the Militia movement in the 1990s. While primarily a strategist, Beam’s influence on Christian Identity and white separatism within the wider movement came through his relationship with Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations/Church of Jesus Christ Christian. History and Background Louis Beam was born on August 20th, 1946 in Lufkin, Texas. At the age of twenty and at the height of the Vietnam War, Beam joined the army where he served for eighteen months as a machine gunner. Beam returned home as a staunch anti-communist, angry at both anti-war protestors and the American government, whom he blamed for his alleged exposure to Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). He began his career as a political activist in the Ku Klux Klan in the early post-civil rights era, soon after his return from Vietnam. He first joined the Klan in 1968, as part of the Texas chapter of the Alabama-based United Klans of America (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). Between 1974 and 1976, Beam decided to go to university and study history, but failed to complete the degree (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). In 1976 Beam left the United Klans, joined David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and was appointed the ‘Grand Dragon’ or leader of the Texas Knights (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). At the time of Beam’s ascent under the leadership of Duke, the Klan and wider extreme right were undergoing a major transformation. As the battle to preserve white supremacy looked like it had been lost in the face of the Civil Rights Act, more radical elements within the John Birch Society and the Klan had been forming paramilitary units, rejecting the state-supportive ideologies and strategies of their predecessors and advocating political violence in an attempt to resist, incite revolution and overthrow the government. Examples of such violent paramilitary groups included the Minutemen, formed in the early 1960s by former John Birch Society member Robert DePugh, the California Rangers and Christian Defense League set up by fellow Klansmen and Christian Identity adherents Wesley Swift, Richard ‘Girnt’ Butler and William Potter Gale, as well as Identity-based constitutionalist organization Posse Comitatus, established in 1969 by former member of the fascist Silver Shirts Henry Beach and led by Gale from 1971 (Berlet and Lyons, 2000). At the end of the 1970s, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were at a crossroads in terms of both their ideological and strategic direction. By the late-1970s, David Duke, the Grand Dragon of the Louisiana Knights, developed a mainstreaming strategy where the Klan would reject violence and explicit racism in favor of democratic electoral activism, including running for elected office as Duke did on numerous occasions, including once for the presidency. This created a split within the Klan where the majority of klantons, including Duke’s, established supplemental armed paramilitary units, much like the Minutemen and others had done in the 1960s. These included: the Invisible Empire, established by Bill Wilkinson who replaced Duke in the Louisiana Knights; the White Patriot Party, established by former Green Beret and American Nazi Party member Glenn Miller of the North Carolina Knights; the Texas Emergency Reserve, established by Beam of the Texas Knights; and White Aryan Resistance (WAR), established by John and Tom Metzger of the California Knights (Ridgeway, 1990, pp. 14-15). Beam, who was widely seen as one of the architects of this new development, and his Texas Emergency Reserve first emerged on the scene in 1981, when he set up a paramilitary training camp and attacked Vietnamese shrimp fishermen on Galveston Bay, Texas (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). These developments mobilized the Southern Poverty Law Center and led to the establishment of Klan Watch, which monitored this new paramilitarized and radicalized extreme right. Soon after, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against Beam and forced him to close down his training camp (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). By this time Beam, an Identity adherent, had already joined his fellow Klansman Robert Miles in Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations which was established in 1977 and would come to dominate the extreme right in the 1980s and 1990s. Beam was appointed Aryan Nations’ national ambassador and would play a role as strategist. Writings, Strategy and Influence Beam’s influence was based primarily on his writings, many of which were published and republished through Aryan Nation’s Teutonic Unity Press and almost all advocated violence. In fact, Beam was critical of other leaders who failed to recognize the link between violence and the potential success of the movement (Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, 2000, p. 175). The first and most significant of these works was Beam’s manifesto Understanding the Struggle, or Why We Have to Kill the Bastards, which was also published in his book Essays of a Klansman (Beam, ND). The second publication was Beam’s Seditious Conspiracy, a booklet included in issue fifty-eight of Calling Our Nation, published in 1987 in response to his indictment for seditious conspiracy (Beam, 1987, pp. 8-21). The third publication and his most significant strategic initiative was Beam’s ‘Leaderless Resistance,’ an essay published in issue twelve of The Seditionist in February 1992 (Beam, 2000, pp. 504-511). In addition to these publications, Beam is also noted for creating the first white supremacist computer bulletin board network (Southern Poverty Law Center, ND). Understanding the Struggle, or Why We Have to Kill the Bastards detailed Beam’s analysis of the movement’s conflicts with the state and Jews and, most notoriously, included an assassination hit list (Beam, ND, pp. 14-15). The list outlined categories of potential enemy targets, from government officials to racial and ethnic minorities (Beam, ND, pp. 14-15), and represented a clear move towards explicit political violence. Each target was designated a point value corresponding to the victims’ position and significance, ranging from one point for the assassination of those in the category of “Control Center” to 1/1000th of a point for those classed as a “Recipient[s]” (Beam, ND, pp. 14-15). This point system provided members with incentives as, the higher the level of the target that was assassinated, the higher the status the assassin would be able to attain within the movement. According to Beam, the highest level status one can attain in the movement is as an “Aryan Warrior,” while the lowest is that of “Cannon Fodder” (Beam, ND, pp. 14-15). In April 1987, a federal grand jury in Arkansas brought charges against Beam, Butler, Miles and their associates for the crime of seditious conspiracy dating from the 1983 Aryan World Congress which spawned The Order. The charges included conspiracy to overthrow the government, assassinate an FBI agent and federal judge, bomb federal buildings, utility pipelines and electrical transmission lines, poison water supplies and sabotage railroads, as well as robbery, transportation of stolen money and counterfeiting (Associated Press, 1988, p. A1). Although all were acquitted, when the trial ended a year later in April 1988, upon his indictment Beam escaped to Mexico, thus becoming a fugitive and earning a place on the FBI’s most wanted list. Beam was eventually recaptured and put on trial with his co-defendants (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002). It was in this context that Beam published Seditious Conspiracy, a booklet included in issue fiftyeight of Calling Our Nation. This document was a direct response to his indictment and statement on his status and philosophy as a political dissident, if not revolutionary. Most notably, the booklet included a copy of Beam’s official wanted poster and his thoughts on the American government, power and freedom, freedom of religion, the ‘system’, political strategy, a more general call to sedition against the Federal government, and a statement calling for white secession from the United States, corresponding to Miles’ and Butler’s ‘Northwest Imperative’ (Beam, 1987, pp. 8-21). According to Beam: Political, economic, religious, and ethnic conditions in the United States have reached the point where patriots are faced with a choice of rebellion or departure. That this is indisputably the case, and further, that the sun has forever set on the American Republic of our Forefathers resulting in the necessity of such choice [sic] being made, is clear upon a collateral deduction that departure … is a sound method of re-establishing a new constitutional republic (Beam, 1987, p. 21). As the new decade emerged and conflict between the government and the movement increased, so did Beam’s profile. It was also at this time that Beam solidified his relationship to Aryan Nations and the Northwest Imperative by relocating from his Texas base to Idaho (Barkun, 1997, p. 281). In February 1992, Beam published his essay ‘Leaderless Resistance’ in issue twelve of The Seditionist. In the essay, Beam called for a paradigm shift in paramilitary combat strategy, from traditional hierarchical forms to that of numerous autonomous cells which would function like a guerrilla army in the movement’s resistance against the state. For Beam, “Leaderless Resistance” represented a rejection of traditional top-down leadership structures. He viewed such structures as dangerous because of the history of infiltration by progovernment forces (Beam, 2000, pp. 506-507). The dangers that Beam identifies with the traditional organizational structure were of particular concern for the movement, as was demonstrated to Beam and others when the FBI recruited The Order’s Tom Martinez as an informant against them (Ridgeway, 1990). According to Beam, Leaderless Resistance is based on a ‘Phantom Cell’ structure, where each cell operates independently and without any central control over, communication with or knowledge of the others, which would prevent the possibility of the infiltration or capture of one cell potentially affecting other cells (Beam, 2000, p. 508). The conflict between the movement and the government increased later that year. Between the 20th and 31st of August 1992, Aryan Nations associate and Identity adherent Randy Weaver’s Ruby Ridge, Idaho home became the site of an eleven day standoff with the FBI and ATF, following an attempt to arrest him for failing to appear in court on weapons charges. The siege resulted in the deaths of Weaver’s wife and son, which mobilized the entire anti-government extreme right and led directly to the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous at Estes Park, Colorado on the 23rd of October 1992 (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2000).. This event, which Richard Butler, Robert Miles and Beam all attended, was organized by Christian Identity minister Pete Peters in order to plan response to Ruby Ridge. It was at this event that Beam’s ‘Leaderless Resistance’ strategy was unveiled publicly (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2000, p. 15; Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, 2000, p. 205). The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous and Leaderless Resistance have been frequently cited as major influences on the development and growth of the militia movement, which would become increasingly prominent over the next few years leading up to the Oklahoma bombing in 1995. Diminished Influence and Decline In the year following Estes Park, Beam re-emerged at the FBI and AFT stand-off with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. The stand-off mobilized the anti-government movement in much the same manner as Ruby Ridge had done and gave Beam a new outlet for his writings and strategies. Under the auspices of a reporter for the Christian Identity newspaper Jubilee, he attended the daily press briefings and got into confrontations with the FBI, eventually getting arrested (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002). As the decade progressed, Beam made occasional appearances at major events such as militia and Christian Identity conferences in 1994 and 1996, and continued posting messages on the internet (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002). By the end of the decade, Beam was remarried for the fifth time, had two sons and made frequent trips to Costa Rica to visit a fugitive friend (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002). He was also engaged in a custody dispute with his fourth ex-wife and had been accused by her of child molestation and cited as a bad ideological influence (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002). The case also revealed the fact that Beam was living on government benefits which were awarded to him because of his posttraumatic stress disorder (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002). Bibliography Associated Press (1988), ‘13 White Supremacists Acquitted of all Charges’, in Seattle Times (April 7), p. A1. Barkun, Michael (1997), Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Beam, Louis, Jr. (ND), Understanding the Struggle: or Why We Have to Kill the Bastards, Hayden Lake: Aryan Nations – Teutonic Unity. ------- (1987), ‘Seditious Conspiracy’, in Calling Our Nation, n. 58, pp.8-21. ------- (2000), ‘Leaderless Resistance’, in Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Right, ed. Jeffrey Kaplan, New York: Altamira Press, pp. 504-511. Berlet, Chip and Lyons, Matthew N. (2000), Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New York: The Guilford Press. Dobratz, Betty A. and Shanks-Meile, Stephanie L. (2000), The White Separatist Movement in the United States: “White Power, White Pride!”, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ridgeway, James (1990), Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and The Rise of The New White Culture, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Southern Poverty Law Center (2000), ‘Bombs, Bullets, Bodies: The Decade in Review’, in SPLC Intelligence Report, n. 97 (Winter), pp. 8-29. ------- (2002), ‘The Firebrand’, in SPLC Intelligence Report (Summer). <http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=86>. Accessed 10/01/2007. ------- (ND), ‘Louis Beam: Hard-Core Revolutionary’, in SPLC Intelligence Report. <http://www.splcenter.org/intelligenceproject/beam.html>. Accessed 06/01/2002.