William Luther Pierce

uniform at Allen Military Academy|left William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11, 1933. He was the eldest son of Marguerite Ferrell, a journalist, and William Luther Pierce II, an insurance salesman, who married in 1929. His father had served in World War I. Through his mother, Pierce's great-great-grandfather was Thomas H. Watts, the governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederate States of America. He had one younger brother, Sanders "Sandy" Pierce. His family moved to Norfolk, Virginia, with his father's insurance business when Pierce was four years old. Pierce's upbringing was at times difficult. Pierce's son, Kelvin, described Pierce as having been born to a mother who rarely showed affection and an alcoholic father who entirely ignored him; Marguerite would pay Pierce to find the alcohol that William Sr. stashed around the house. Pierce's father was killed in a car accident involving a teenaged driver on January 30, 1943, when Pierce was nine years old. Following his father's death, Pierce and his brother were supported by their mother, and moved throughout the Southern United States. From the age of 10 on, Pierce worked odd jobs to help his family. Pierce attended public schools throughout the South, attending junior high in Dallas, Texas, until the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama. When his mother remarried, Pierce was sent to a military academy. His last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, where he did well academically. He worked at the school's chemistry stockrooms. Pierce later said that as a teen he had been "sort of a nerdy kid without social skills", awkward around women and with few friends. His teenage hobbies and interests were chemistry, electronics, and reading science fiction works, particularly the pulp magazine Planet Stories. == Education and physics career ==

Pierce earned a full scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston in 1951. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a time in mid-1955, then did his graduate studies at California Institute of Technology starting later that year. At the University of Colorado Boulder, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962. and he studied under the physicist W. H. Tantila. In 1957, Pierce married Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960. After getting his doctorate, Pierce taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965. The only organization he belonged to at this time was the American Physical Society. At this time he considered himself largely uninterested in politics. During his education, Pierce paid little attention to the wider world; he claimed that he had initially been sympathetic to the idea of Black civil rights, but was suspicious of integration as damaging freedom of association. He was inflamed by what he viewed as a media bias against segregationists; when some of his colleagues blamed this on Jews, he became more interested in racial matters, and became increasingly militant in his thoughts on race. He blamed Jews for the civil rights movement, along with the protests against the Vietnam War. According to his son Kelvin, after Pierce became interested in racial matters he ceased to pay much attention to his children, outside of beating them. Pierce regularly physically abused his children. He worked as a senior research associate physicist at Pratt, earning a $15,400 a year salary. He received government security clearance for this job but never actually worked on classified projects. He directed a United States Air Force grant of $35,000 on semiconductors. There, he spent his time undertaking his own study of political and historical topics, which radicalized him further, reading alarmist books about race at the Yale University Library. He was not openly racist with his coworkers; when the ANP was investigated, his coworkers described him as a "first-class physicist", but also "impenetrable", and said they had an "intense dislike of him as a person". He was known as a loner and for the lack of instruction he gave subordinate researchers. == White supremacy ==

American Nazi Party In 1963, Pierce saw on television a clip of protests against George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party (ANP); intrigued by Rockwell, he struck up a correspondence with him. Pierce found Rockwell personally impressive, and the party's ideology appealed to him, but he disliked their explicit Nazi imagery. According to Rockwell, Pierce mailed him complaining Rockwell had some things right but was thinking too small, to which Rockwell said Pierce should do something himself. It was directed by Jacob Young. The title is a reference to how Pierce imagined his detractors portraying him. Starting in 1991, Pierce hosted a weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices. The NA also distributed the National Vanguard periodical and maintained a website. Pierce rarely talked to the media, believing them to be dominated by Jews. While in West Virginia, the National Alliance was monitored by authorities, but mostly left to their own devices. The FBI investigated Pierce, with their file on him growing to hundreds of pages long. Unlike many white supremacist leaders of the period, Pierce was never convicted of any crime. Pierce and The Turner Diaries gained attention following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who was inspired by the book. McVeigh used a very similar method to the book's main character, who is placed in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters with a fertilizer truck bomb. When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found with him, with several phrases highlighted. Pierce's stated opinion on the bombing varied; at one time Pierce denounced the bombing as it had not been at the right time. At other times, he said he did approve of the bombing. In 2000, Pierce was profiled in a biography entitled ''The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds'' by academic Robert S. Griffin. == Death ==

In early 2002 Pierce was diagnosed with cancer. Pierce died of kidney failure at his Hillsboro, West Virginia, compound on July 23, 2002. Shortly before his death, Pierce selected Erich Gliebe as his successor; Gliebe was the manager of Resistance Records. Pierce's final public speech came on April 20, 2002 (Hitler's birthday). In this speech he criticized the rest of the White Power movement and other neo-Nazi groups, and promoted the cause of the National Alliance; this speech was divisive among white supremacists. This, in combination with in-group disputes and poor leadership, led to the National Alliance becoming far less significant after Pierce's death than it was under his leadership. In 2020, his son Kelvin coauthored Sins of My Father, which chronicled his experiences with his father, and his rejection of his views. == Views ==

Pierce's views were centered around race, which he defined physically, culturally and spiritually; he believed that whites were the evolutionary peak of the human species and that they were being plotted against by Jews. He viewed other racial groups as not always inevitable enemies, with the exception of Jews, who he believed would inevitably conflict with white people. Pierce was frequently described as a neo-Nazi, although he personally rejected this label. When confronted with the issue by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Pierce described the term as a slander, saying that though he "admire[d] many things that Hitler wrote", the National Alliance had "formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today". Among Pierce's claimed inspirations for the development of his views were Dietrich Eckart's Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, August Kubizek's The Young Hitler I Knew, and Savitri Devi's The Lightning and the Sun. From Nietzsche he was particularly taken by the idea of being a master of one's own life and the points of power of the will. In Eckart's essay he found an ideological backing for his antisemitism, while he incorporated Devi's racist mysticism from Lightning and the Sun into his ideology. Also influential on the development of his political thought were the works of American white supremacists Francis Parker Yockey, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant. He was also influenced by white nationalist writer William Gayley Simpson; Pierce published Simpson's book, Which Way Western Man? According to his son Kelvin, he had asked Pierce why he had chosen white supremacy over all else, to which Pierce responded that it "was the only responsible thing I could do". Pierce was opposed to individualism and largely viewed politics as a manifestation of group dynamics, criticizing modern American society as atomized and selfish. He accused individualists such as Ayn Rand, who was ethnically Jewish, of plotting against whites by promoting individualism to them. Pierce's goal was to convince the white population through propaganda, leading ultimately to a violent race revolution; he promoted his views through several mediums. Particularly important to his political views was World War II, perceived by Pierce as the most important event in modern Western history. He saw it as the triumph of democracy over fascism, which he believed to be the detriment of future generations, and led to the 1960s counterculture. He believed the counterculture was a kulturkampf designed to destroy Western civilization. He found the popularity of Holocaust denialism on the far-right to be regrettable; he said he had "spoken with SS men who told me that they shot Jews, and I believed them". Instead he said that white supremacists should "face the Holocaust squarely and judge it on the basis of a higher morality, according to which it is only the upward course of Life which is sacred". Pierce was publicly critical of most contemporary right-wing terrorism, particularly lone wolf terrorism, though not for moral reasons. He agreed ideologically with the perpetrators of most right-wing lone wolf terrorism of the period, but thought it was ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. He accepted that "civilians are going to be killed", but said the current time was incorrect for it and it lacked "a plan that can be reasonably argued will get you what you want to achieve". Despite these statements, Pierce dedicated his second book, Hunter, to lone wolf terrorist Joseph Paul Franklin, and became associated with the strategy of leaderless resistance; he also had several followers who committed acts of lone-wolf terrorism. His approach to terrorism was, according to scholar George Michael, "a gradual approach to terrorism with a preparatory stage which emphasized propaganda and organization". In the 1970s, Pierce created a religious philosophy he called cosmotheism. Cosmotheism synergized mystical and scientific ideas. It combined Darwinian ideas with ancient Germanic legends. The faith was atheistic and did not believe in a particular god. It emphasizes evolutionary development, and portrays the future as a linear evolutionary path related to race. In 2001, Pierce officiated the Cosmotheist wedding ceremony of Billy Roper, then a top staffer at the National Alliance. Cosmotheism was highly esoteric in its beliefs, which led to it having little influence on neo-Nazis outside of the National Alliance. It was influenced somewhat by Savitri Devi's thought. == Bibliography ==