In 1983, the Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, Louis Beam, began quietly circulating an essay among white supremacist groups in America. “Those who love liberty, and believe in freedom enough to fight for it are rare today,” he wrote. “We are a band of brothers, native to the soil gaining strength one from another as we have rushed headlong into a battle that all the weaker, timid men, say we can not win.” Beam wanted to restructure the white supremacist movement, and believed “it will become necessary to consider other methods of organization—or as the case may very well call for: non-organization.”
Beam was a new kind of white supremacist: media-savvy, militarized, and ambitious. Cross burnings and white robes were great, but given the climate of government scrutiny after the civil rights era, he argued for stealthier modes of violence. Building this new movement might take decades, but, he wrote, “Let the coming night be filled with a thousand points of resistance.”
His theory of “leaderless resistance” quickly became a central strategy for white supremacists nationwide, and one that defines the operating sensibility of the racist right even today. Once described as “one of the most dangerous men in the world,” Beam’s ideologies, tactics, and “career” would come to define the militant American fringe. Without him and his theories, there would be no “alt-right.”
Beam was born in 1946 in Lufkin, Texas, a small manufacturing town near the Louisiana border. As a child, he had been obsessed with Southern history, playing Civil War games with friends in which he was always the Rebel soldier announcing that the South would rise again. According to interviews with his childhood friends, he was a born Ku Klux Klan recruiter, claiming to be a KKK member in the fourth grade and attempting to wrangle likeminded classmates.
He has told reporters that he earned a bachelor’s degree in history, and done some master’s work at the University of Houston. (Though the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked Beam for 40 years, claims he never finished college). By 19, he was an average-looking white man, of below-average height, who spoke in a measured Texan drawl. He volunteered for the Army and ended up a helicopter gunner in Vietnam. There, he experienced “the joys of killing your enemy,” as he put it, and later bragged of gunning down as many as 51 people. He returned from the war in 1969, with a “Born to Lose” tattoo on his arm and the idea in his mind that the government had made a joke of the military by not allowing them to win the war — a sentiment shared by tens of thousands of aggrieved vets.