Willis Carto

Willis Allison Carto was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana on July 17, 1926, to Willis Frank Carto, a paper salesman, and Dorothy Louise Carto (), then 22 and 21 years of age respectively. He was of French and German descent through his father, descended from Huguenot settlers; his family originally spelled their surname Carteaux, which was anglicized to Carto by his grandfather. Carto had one brother, David, four years his junior. The family was Methodist and attended the Wayne Street Methodist Church. As a child, Carto served as the church's head usher. His family varied politically and often had heated political debates; his father was a Republican, but was not politically active, which Carto later derided him for. In his youth, he and his family listened to the broadcasts of antisemitic preacher Charles Coughlin. He attended Harrison Hill Grade School, before attending South Side High School. Fort Wayne was highly segregated while he was growing up, though Carto had a childhood friend who was black. As an adolescent, Carto was generally not exposed to racial tensions and did not think much about race. He had an early interest in newspapers and other printing, describing his childhood hero as Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. He worked a variety of odd jobs, and eventually at a print shop and was a door-to-door magazine salesman. His father bought him a printing press and Carto learned to manually set type. As a teenager he published his own free paper targeted at a young audience, the Canteen Chronicle. Carto graduated from high school in June 1944. == Military service ==

With World War II ongoing, Carto attempted to join the United States Navy but was rejected due to having an illness. After the illness was cured, the United States Army drafted him. He attended basic training at Camp Fannin in Texas, and was thereafter sent to Fort Ord in California. He went on to serve in the Philippines with the Americal Division. While serving in the Philippines, one of his closest friends was killed in combat, which affected Carto. Additionally, Carto was shot in the arm by a Japanese sniper; this earned him the Purple Heart, and he was also awarded the Combat Infantry Badge for his service. He would ultimately rise to the rank of corporal. Following the United States's victory over Japan, Carto was transferred there and served as part of the occupying force in Sendai. He was transferred back to the United States in 1946 and stationed at Illinois's Fort Sheridan. He received an honorable discharge that year. While he did not regret serving in the military, Carto later expressed disgust over his military service, describing it as a fight against his own political beliefs and for foreign governments. == Political career ==

After leaving the military, he lived with his parents in Mansfield, Ohio. At the behest of his parents, he studied law for two years at Denison University, but did not graduate, instead moving onto University of Cincinnati Law School where he studied for a semester before dropping out in 1949. His grades were apparently average; Carto attributed his decision to drop out to wanderlust. He came to work as a distributor for Procter & Gamble. This job allowed Carto to travel frequently distributing the company's products. These travels exposed Carto to racial and other political issues in a way that he had not been previously, such as Southern black slums. Initially, he was relatively sympathetic to the plight of poor black Americans, but soon came to view them as fundamentally inferior to white Americans, "content to live in slums". He was promoted to crew manager with the company, at the same time becoming politically discontent with the establishment as out of touch. With the outbreak of the Korean War, his department was terminated by the company and Carto was out of a job. He moved west to San Francisco, California where he worked for the Household Finance Company, a loan company. While at this job he began working as a political organizer, first entering the right-wing political scene in 1952. The same year, he launched the periodical Right, mostly made up of reprints from other sources. Unlike his later ventures Right had little impact. The Liberty Lobby later launched numerous other periodicals, most importantly the Liberty Letter. Throughout the mid to late 1950s, Carto's non-political job was selling coffee and printing machines. Carto would meet Elisabeth Waltraud Oldemeier at a National Review gathering in the 1950s. Oldemeier was 11 years Carto's junior and had been born in Germany. They married on November 15, 1958, and remained married until Carto's death; the couple never had any children. She was deeply loyal to Carto and his politics and frequently collaborated with him on his political efforts. In 1960, Carto was the last person to see the far-right activist Francis Parker Yockey alive. He obtained a 15-minute interview with Yockey in prison on June 10, 1960, while the latter was held in prison for passport fraud. Yockey committed suicide six days later on June 16. Yockey had written a book, previously obscure and published in the late 1940s to little fanfare, titled Imperium; Carto became a devotee of Yockey and the ideology he espoused in Imperium. Following his death, Carto became the lead promoter of Yockey's writings and republished it with his Noontide Press, bringing the book to a much wider audience. For some decades after the suicide there was a persistent, but likely false, rumor among far-righters that Carto had assisted in Yockey's suicide. Noontide also published books on white racialism, including and David Hoggan's The Myth of the Six Million, one of the first books to deny the Holocaust. In 1966, Carto acquired control of The American Mercury. To replace the Liberty Letter, the Liberty Lobby published The Spotlight newspaper between 1975 and 2001. With the Liberty Lobby Carto launched a radio program, This Is Liberty Lobby; the Anti-Defamation League launched a campaign to get the show off the air, which succeeded, much to Carto's chagrin. Historical revisionism, Holocaust denial, and the Populist Party Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review in 1979. The IHR and Carto were sued in 1981 by public interest attorney William John Cox on behalf of Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein. In that case, which was to eventually last eleven years, the court took "judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during the summer of 1944." During the case Carto claimed that the Jewish Defense League had tried to firebomb his home. After losing control of Noontide Press and the IHR in a hostile takeover by former associates, Carto started another publication, The Barnes Review, with the focus also on Holocaust denial from 1994. Noontide Press later became closely associated with the IHR, and fell out of Carto's hands at the same time as the IHR did. Carto let himself be extensively interviewed for extremism scholar George Michael's 2008 book Willis Carto and the American Far Right, which was the first substantial biography of Carto. == Death ==

Carto died on October 26, 2015, at the age of 89, reportedly from cardiac arrest. In February 2016, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery (which the family had the right to request because he had earned a Purple Heart). Far-right and white nationalist Pastor Thomas A. Robb presided at the funeral. ==Views and influences==

Later, Carto would define his ideology as Jeffersonian and populist rather than National Socialist, particularly in Carto's 1982 book, Profiles in Populism. That book presented sympathetic profiles of several United States political figures including Thomas Jefferson, Huey Long, Robert M. La Follette, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Ford, as well as Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin, who used radio to support of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He was primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. a far-rightist who heralded Adolf Hitler's Third Reich as the "European Imperium" against both Bolshevism and the United States, which he considered Jewish-controlled. Scholars have asserted that Yockey would have probably been forgotten without Carto's marketing of Imperium to the American audience. Carto was an intensely private man, with little known about him publicly for many decades. He had a reputation even among other right wing activists as a "shadowy figure", and despite his immense influence on the far right, remains little known to those who study American political developments. Jeffrey Kaplan noted his career in racism as "remarkable" and "remarkably consistent. None of his innumerable associations over the years has ended amicably. Rather, bitter splits and even more bitterly contested lawsuits have long been the lot of the irascible Carto." George Michael noted that "over the past several decades, he has raised millions of dollars for his causes, yet he has received very little national publicity and has been virtually ignored by the mainstream press. Despite this obscurity, Carto is undoubtedly the central figure in the post-World War II American far right. More than any other person, he has fostered continuity within this movement and has been involved in virtually all of its major projects." Leonard Zeskind argued that "when a resurgence of white supremacist activity began in the mid-1970s, the footprints of [...] Carto were found at almost every point." == Publications ==

• Profiles in Populism (as editor). Old Greenwich, CT: Flag Press (1982) . • Introduction to Imperium (1963) • Introduction to The Myth of the Six Million (1969), as E. L. Anderson • Afterword to Best Witness: The Mermelstein Affair, by Michael C. Piper. America First Books. Washington: Center for Historical Review (1994) • Populism vs. Plutocracy: The Universal Struggle (as editor). Liberty Lobby. ==References==