Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

Belew (history, Univ. of Chicago) traces late 20th-century white power violence from the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City bombing. As white soldiers returned to the United States after tours in Vietnam, some "never stopped fighting" the racialized "other." This study uses contemporary media coverage, government records, and the literature of white power activists to chart how the pain and rage of some white soldiers was transmuted into violence against people of color and revolutionary antistate violence. The first part documents how Vietnam served to unify and militarize disparate white power groups during the 1970s and 1980s; Part 2 looks at how the rhetoric of patriotism shifted in the mid-1980s to one of revolution; while Part 3 considers how government violence at Ruby Ridge, ID, (1992) and Waco, TX, (1993) strengthened white power narratives of martyrdom while mainstream narratives around the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing occluded the white power network that made Timothy McVeigh's action possible. Of particular note is Belew's chapter on the understudied topic of white women's role in the movement.