A schoolteacher was about to burn the books collected by her late grandfather when she called James A. Aho of Idaho State University.
Instead, Mr. Aho paid to receive six boxes of extremist literature that had belonged to the founder of the Aryan Nations Church, a white-supremacist group based in Idaho. The professor of sociology had written about the group. “I call this my library of infamy,” he says. “Henry Ford’s The International Jew -- an original copy -- stuff like that.”
While law-enforcement officials and the media scrambled to figure out who was behind the April 19 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, Mr. Aho and other scholars who study American extremist groups turned to their own libraries of anti-Semitic literature, conspiracy theories, and racist pamphlets.
“You have to read this to understand the world view of these people,” says Mr. Aho. “It’s painful, but that’s what you do as a sociologist.” He is the author of The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism and This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy.
Although the bombing suspects have been linked only indirectly to right-wing organizations, scholars who study the movements say they are not surprised by the loose network of paramilitary groups and religious extremists that has been unearthed in the aftermath of April 19. Several note that the day after the bombing, they told their classes that home-grown right-wing groups were a likely culprit -- before the arrest of Timothy McVeigh pointed in that direction.
On April 20, Michigan State University issued a press release urging the news media to contact John Nutter as an expert. Mr. Nutter, an assistant professor of international relations, had collected material on and had spent time with militia groups in Michigan and elsewhere, though he has not published on the subject. In the release, he warned against assuming that the bombing was a foreign terrorist act, noting that The Turner Diaries, a book revered by neo-Nazi groups, provides details on blowing up a federal building with a bomb made from fertilizer.
Excerpts from The Turner Diaries are included in Extremism in America, a reader that New York University Press originally planned to release in the fall. The book draws extensively from the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements at the University of Kansas library, the most extensive of its kind in the nation. Anticipating strong interest, N.Y.U. Press is rushing the book to press this month and tripling the print run.
The right-wing tracts included in the book are familiar documents to the coterie of scholars who study American extremism. Within such fields as sociology, political science, and criminal justice, these scholars are odd birds, focusing on movements that their colleagues find marginal and distasteful. Even law-enforcement officials, they say, have ignored their insights into the groups and their members, preferring to lean on what one scholar called the “cult model.”
But especially in the aftermath of Oklahoma City, they urge that the political messages of the groups be taken seriously, no matter how inflammatory or bizarre they seem. “They fit into the American political mosaic somewhere,” says Mr. Nutter. “They’re not completely separate.”
Peter C. Sederberg has written several books about what turns political movements violent. “You have to understand terrorism as a form of political violence,” he says, “and you have to see political violence as a form of political resistance. You can’t come to an understanding until you see it as embedded in the context of normal politics.” He is a professor of government and international studies at the University of South Carolina.
While scores of books and articles have been produced on international terrorism, political violence on these shores has received relatively little scholarly attention. “Until recently, what most people asked was why the United States was an exception,” notes Martha Crenshaw, a professor of government at Wesleyan University. She is the editor of a new collection, Terrorism in Context (Pennsylvania State University Press), which reviews the history of terrorist activity elsewhere.
The few scholars who do study the American context have been quickly caught up in a swirl of media inquiries and legislative attention. Last week, Brent L. Smith of the University of Alabama at Birmingham testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, summarizing the findings from his 1994 book, Terrorism in America: Pipe Bombs and Pipe Dreams.
In the book, Mr. Smith, an associate professor of criminal justice and sociology, generally left out discussion of who joins right-wing extremist groups and why, although he predicted that “some of these groups almost certainly will turn to terror to express their frustration with social conditions,” which range from the growth of minority populations to the shrinking job market.
Instead, his is a nuts-and-bolts analysis of how the government prosecuted people indicted during the 1980s under its counter-terrorism program. His task was harder than it might seem, since the Federal Bureau of Investigation has published only summary reports, without details of specific figures and cases.
With the help of an F.B.I. analyst, Mr. Smith generated a data base of 213 cases from 1981 to 1989. In the book, he compared the handling of right- and left-wing terrorist groups and analyzed the government’s strategy in breaking up white-supremacist groups that had committed violence in the Northwest. In 1983, the Justice Department introduced guidelines that gave the F.B.I. more leeway to go after such groups, a campaign that Mr. Smith said has been largely successful.
Last week he told Congress that federal efforts were working, and he advised against the establishment of “terrorism-specific statutes.” He also suggested financing empirical studies on why social movements turn violent.
But he pointed out that the rise of militias may be a sign that right-wing groups are moving to a model of “leaderless resistance,” more difficult to break up than previous organizations.
In an interview, Mr. Smith said scholars must guard against the kind of “tunnel vision” in which they try to predict crimes rather than understand motivations. “We have to keep our hands in our pockets and not do the work of law-enforcement officials,” he said.
Sociologists who conduct fieldwork on extremist groups say the world view of members is shaped by economic insecurity, deep suspicion of the government, and, in many cases, a religious fervor that anticipates an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.
Mr. Aho of Idaho State interviewed several hundred members of “Christian-patriot” groups for his 1990 book, The Politics of Righteousness. In the early 1980s, groups like the Aryan Nations Church and the Order made their violent presence felt in his and nearby states. He said he undertook the project because he felt disturbed yet powerless about what was going on. He has studied the ties between religion and violence for most of his career.
He attended workshops, religious services, and conventions as he broadened his sample of interviewees and collected their literature. His goal was to figure out the religious underpinnings of the movement and determine why people chose to get involved.
“At first I was frightened of these people. I had demonized them,” Mr. Aho says. “Once I started talking to them, I realized they’re not that different from me. I discovered they were human beings -- they have all the rich texture of other people.”
His new book, This Thing of Darkness, takes a more theoretical look at the way groups construct their foes. To develop ways of understanding the “deconstruction of the enemy,” he has also conducted interviews with people who have left hate groups.
In Religion and the Racist Right, Michael Barkun studied the Christian Identity movement, the dominant religious strand of the far right. Among its beliefs: white people are the literal descendants of the tribes of Israel; Jews are the product of a sexual union between Eve and Satan; and these are the last days before a cosmic apocalypse.
“Because so many of their beliefs are bizarre and repugnant, people tend to discount them as crazy,” says Mr. Barkun, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. But such groups fit into the larger history of American millennialism, he says, and such thinking is now more prevalent than at any time in the previous 150 years.
Mr. Barkun and other scholars say the fatal incident in which federal agents raided the compound of the Branch Davidians near Waco, Tex., makes clear that law-enforcement officials need training to better understand such groups and predict their behavior. “We’re dealing with groups who see themselves as advancing ultimate values, values linked to a vision of history and a divine plan,” he says. “It’s not simply another interest group out there.” (In a forthcoming book, Why Waco?, two religious-studies professors link the assault to increasing public intolerance for unorthodox religions.)
Mr. Barkun is editing a special issue on millennialism for the journal, Terrorism and Political Violence. The journal has published only a handful of articles on American extremist groups, but more are in the pipeline, according to its editor, David C. Rapoport, a professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Another forthcoming issue of the journal takes up a new twist in radical-right-wing politics -- the influence of American ideas on European groups. The “Euro-American radical right” will be studied by Leonard Weinberg, professor of political science at the University of Nevada at Reno, and Jeffrey Kaplan, who teaches history at a branch of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Mr. Weinberg says he has established an alias and has a post-office box at which he will receive literature. “I don’t think ‘Weinberg’ will work well with neo-Nazis,” he says.
Scholars who are perceived as liberal might seem to be the last people able to gain access to staunch right-wing groups. But, “in fact, they’re dying to talk,” says Mr. Rapoport of U.C.L.A. “That’s one of their problems -- that no one listens to them.”
Encounters With the Contemporary Radical Right, edited by Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (Westview Press, 1993)
Extremism in America: A Reader, edited by Lyman Tower Sargent (New York University Press, 1995)
Fires Within: Political Violence and Revolutionary Change, by Peter C. Sederberg (HarperCollins, 1994)
The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism, by James A. Aho (University of Washington Press, 1990)
Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, by Michael Barkun (University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Terrorism in America: Pipe Bombs and Pipe Dreams, by Brent L. Smith (State University of New York Press, 1994)
The Terrorist Trap: America’s Experience with Terrorism, by Jeffrey D. Simon (Indiana University Press, 1994)
This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy, by James A. Aho (University of Washington Press, 1995)
Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America, by James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher (University of California Press, 1995)
