Suggested Reading: Books by U-M faculty and graduates, and works published by the University of Michigan Press.
(Michigan Today cannot review or acknowledge all books received)

· The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right
· Long Bomb: How the XFL Became TV's Biggest Fiasco

The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right
By Daniel Levitas '82, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2002, $27.95 hardcover.

Reasonable people may scoff at right-wing extremists who claim that black helicopter sightings herald a UN-led military takeover of the United States. But we do ourselves a serious disservice if we regard militia cadres and their progenitors merely as fringe elements and ignore the extent to which their one-world, don't-tread-on-me phobias dovetail with widely held suspicions and deep-rooted anxieties.

Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door, an exemplary history of America's home-grown radical right, cautions against underestimating the threat posed by hate groups and hard-core fellow travelers, who, though relatively few in number, have nonetheless succeeded in influencing aspects of mainstream politics and discourse. Today, there are millions of Americans who think that the United States is in imminent danger of surrendering its sovereignty to a shadowy, globalist clique that covertly controls the "New World Order." Some even subscribe to the conviction that citizens must arm themselves to stop a tyrannical government from usurping their constitutional rights.

Consider this small but telling incident recounted by Levitas. In May 1994, Oklahoma legislators ratified dubious conspiracy theories when the state House passed a resolution urging Congress to "cease any support for the establishment of a 'new world order' [and to] refrain from taking any further steps toward the economic or political merger of the United States into a world body or any form of world government." Obsessed by similar ideas, a fanatic named Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building a year later.

The Terrorist Next Door describes the birth of the gun-toting vigilante organization known as the Posse Comitatus and the development of the modern paramilitary right. Much of this copiously researched saga revolves around Posse founder William Potter Gale (1916-1988), a Christian Identity pastor with a rap sheet, whose virulent white supremacist sermons inspired a rogues' gallery of malcontents, including such notable recruits as Richard Butler, leader of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations. Levitas credits Gale with introducing the notion of "unorganized citizens 'militias'" that became a hallmark of the Christian Patriot movement in the 1990s.

Nourished by the odiferous compost of paranoia and hate that has long moldered on the American margins, Gale linked the Posse's ideas and values to centuries-old racist myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. In a bizarre and unexpected twist, it turns out that Gale's family was Jewish. The Gales fled Eastern Europe to escape anti-Semitism and settled in the United States in the late 1800s.

"Bill Gale was a Jewish anti-Semite who spent a lifetime trying to convince other anti-Semites that they, too, were Jews," writes Levitas. "As for his real Jewish identity, it was a secret he kept hidden" lest it ruin his career as a professional white supremacist. Gale cut his teeth as a right-wing militant in the early 1950s, when fervent anti-communism provided a convenient cover for racist opposition to civil rights. He was particularly disdainful of conventional conservatives who refused to acknowledge the "Jewish roots" of Bolshevism—a canard repeatedly invoked by Gale and other American anti-Semites, who helped set the stage for the Hollywood blacklist by alleging that Jewish film moguls used motion pictures to spread communism.

"One cannot divorce the explosion of anti-Communism in the 1950s from the decades of Jew-hatred that preceded it," Levitas observes. Gale hardly blazed new trails when he harangued his acolytes to take up arms to defend segregation, root out communist subversion and resist the evils of federal authority. But Gale would soon distinguish himself by fashioning a unique, American-sounding ideology that mixed muddled arguments for anti-big-government constitutionalism with traditional isolationist rhetoric and bare-knuckled bigotry disguised as patriotism. He had a knack for promoting racism and anti-Semitism by latching them onto issues with genuine mass appeal, such as the pervasive dislike of banks and taxes.

When Gale launched the Posse Comitatus in the early 1970s, he tailored much of his message to the fledgling right-wing tax protest movement. Railing against the "Karl Marx-inspired socialist income tax," he maintained that the American Revolution began as an anti-tax insurgency. Actually, the Boston Tea Party was a protest against "taxation without representation," and Gale was an outspoken enemy of representative democracy as well as ethnic pluralism. Nevertheless, as Levitas argues, echoes of Gale's anti-tax dogma reverberated years later in legislation that drastically weakened the IRS and guaranteed a sharp decline in audits of wealthy Americans and big corporations.

The Posse gathered momentum as the farm crisis in the Midwest deepened in the 1980s. A devastating combination of low prices, high interest rates and plummeting land values resulted in an epidemic of foreclosures and bankruptcies throughout rural America. More than 750,000 family farms went under during this period. The financial contagion was directly related to political decisions made in Washington that favored huge agribusinesses that dominated the market.

Levitas traces the rise and fall of the American Agriculture Movement, a grass-roots effort that initially supported reasonable policy proposals, including price supports and other forms of government intervention on behalf of debt-ridden farmers. Then the Posse Comitatus came along and spread its poison among the movement's members. The struggle for economic justice veered off course as thinly disguised white supremacist propaganda channeled legitimate concerns toward a spurious international Jewish plot.

Despite a proven penchant for bloodshed, the Posse Comitatus was largely ignored by government officials as it grew into a sprawling, national network during the 1980s with 15,000 adherents and perhaps as many as 10 times more supporters, according to Levitas. The task of countering the Posse's pernicious influence was instead taken up by progressive farm support groups, such as Prairie Fire and Rural America. Levitas worked with these groups throughout the 1980s as they waged a vigorous campaign against hatred in the heartland.

Like a super-virus that mutates to accommodate changes in its habitat, the Posse continually reinvented itself. After the farm crisis, Gale's minions metamorphosed into the post-Cold War militia movement. The militias broadened the appeal of the Christian Patriot subculture and ensured the survival of Gale's catechism—albeit in a new and somewhat softer form. The main goal of the militias was to establish private armies throughout the country to resist enforcement of federal gun control laws.

While bracing for the next terrorist strike from Al Qaeda, we should not downplay the likelihood that another McVeigh will emerge from the bowels of the Christian Patriot movement, which, Levitas warns, is here with us to stay, in one form or another.—Excerpted from The Los Angeles Times Book Review by Martin A. Lee '75. Lee is the author of The Beast Reawakens, a book on European-US neofascism, reviewed in the Fall 1997 Michigan Today.

Top of page

Long Bomb: How the XFL Became TV's Biggest Fiasco
By Brett Forrest '95, Crown Publishers, 2002, $24.95 hardbound.

In Long Bomb, Brett Forrest, a former Michigan Daily sports editor and now a New York City freelancer, attacks his subject like NFL Hall of Famer Dick Butkus attacked quarterbacks in his days with the Chicago Bears. The XFL was a brash joint venture between the latter day P.T. Barnum, Vince McMahon, whose World Wrestling Federation has been so wildly successful, and Dick Ebersole of NBC Television, who had learned the TV sports business as a protégé of the late Roone Arledge of ABC.

How McMahon's obsession and Ebersole's need come together to create a football league in a matter of months makes for a wild tale and Forrest is a great storyteller. McMahon was looking for more glory, Ebersole for a Saturday night audience. The subject called for sharp-edged humor and Forrest comes through. Actually, the Prologue sets the book up perfectly with his deft account of the launch of a small blimp decked out to look like an XFL football. The flight comes to an undignified—and ominous—end with the blimp plunged nose first into an Oakland, California garage.

Recalling the announcement of the new league in January 2001, Forrest writes, "This was perhaps the loudest press conference on record. McMahon and [XFL announcer, Minnesota Governor Jesse] Ventura had been steroid pincushions for years, while Ebersole just looked like a strung-out ex-weightlifter." When the XFL finally folded, Forrest described Butkus, whom McMahon brought on to add a measure of football credibility to the league as Director of Competition, looking as if he were "passing a stone."

Forrest

Forrest gives us more than a glimpse into the business and the character of Vince McMahon, the force behind the entertainment phenomenon of the WWF, a multinational, publicly traded corporation, that encompasses network and television programming, product licensing and a New York restaurant, among other enterprises. McMahon's larger than life ego and energy infuses every aspect of the WWF operation. It was this combination that drove his obsessive desire, as Forrest portrays it, to capture the grit and brutality of professional football's early years by promoting the XFL as a throwback.

Then there was the NBC Television executive, Dick Ebersole, an old friend of McMahon's, who had had to let go of NFL football just a year before, having been unrealistically outbid by Rupert Murdock's Fox Network. NBC had practically no audience on Saturday night to lead in to its long-running hit Saturday Night Live. He was in trouble when he happened to hear his friend's "loud" news conference. Forrest gives us a fascinating look at how far a traditional television network has to go to compete in the 300-cable channel, VCR, DVD entertainment environment, and what they risk—and surprisingly don't risk—when they fail.

Forrest is knowledgeable and adept in his description and analysis of the audience and cost projections in the business plan the corporate partners develop. This part of the book will be useful for business students who employ it as a case study, but the pace of the book slows down markedly here. An uninterested reader could skim through it without losing much of the thread of the narrative.
The meat of the book is the game-by-game odyssey of the Las Vegas Outlaws through the XFL season. Here Forrest is a reporter, displaying his talent not only for humor, but also for pathos, psychological depth and description. He treats the players, nearly every one of whom had either played in the NFL or been part of a major college program, with great respect:

"Welcome to the desensitized zone. Some guys played a few games in the NFL before being waived. Other guys bounced from one NFL practice squad to the next without seeing any real action.... Still others went high in the NFL draft only to crash and burn, ill equipped to handle the very real pressures of the pros, so different from the unpaid existence of college sports, where 'job competition' has as much real-world meaning as 'work-study.'"

Some of the players and coaches still held out hope of being noticed by NFL scouts. One was the "XFL poster boy" Rod Smart of the Outlaws, who gained renown with his jersey slogan, "He Hate Me." Smart eventually succeeded in signing a short-term contract with the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles. Another hopeful was former University of Miami star, Ryan Clement, the Outlaws' starting quarterback. Forrest takes us up close to one of what he calls "the disappeared" college football stars the filled the XFL rosters. The Outlaws start out well, primarily because of their strong defense, but Clements is inconsistent, leading to his replacement at midseason. He regains his starting job, but the Outlaws lose their early edge and Clement must watch the league championship—the final XFL game—from a barstool.

The XFL was a failure as a football league and as entertainment, but it broke ground technically. NBC assigned its top technical wizard, John Gonzales to the XFL broadcasts, which had far more cameras than NFL games, including a roving camera on the field that took viewers inside the huddle. As well, quarterbacks were miked so viewers could hear plays called in the huddle and signals barked at the line. The XFL marked the first use of the "Sky Cam," a camera strung on a wire above the field, giving viewers an overhead look at play on the field. Miking of players and the Sky Cam were both used in the Super Bowl on January 26th.

Long Bomb is a funny, hard-hitting, well-researched book about the entertainment business; but most of all, it's a thoughtful book about football players as people. As I write this, a member of the Oakland Raiders—a Pro Bowl center—was just dismissed from the team before the Super Bowl for missing team meetings and practices during the final days before the game. There's a human story there and Brett Forrest would know just how to tell it.—Joel Seguine (University News Service).

INTERVIEW WITH BRETT FORREST.

Michigan Today: What was it like, asking critical, not to say skeptical, questions of hostile, muscle-bound promoters of the XFL?
Brett Forrest: I was writing the unauthorized story of McMahon's attempt at reinventing sports on TV—the XFL—which lasted one ultimately forgettable season on NBC. And every time I saw Vince McMahon come around a corner, I thought he was going to crush me like a worm. The guy definitely had it in for me. But that was OK. If he killed me, I'd probably sell more books.

When you began the project, many assumed the league would succeed, didn't they?
The publishing house that contracted me was betting on the league striking up a little controversy at the least, or becoming the next Survivor if all went according to plan. The XFL did neither, although the league earned distinction as the lowest-rated program in the history of prime-time network TV.
In a sense, you found yourself with a mess of broken eggs, and had to make an omelet.

Making a book out of that mess wasn't easy. I never set out to write the story of a crack-up. It just turned out that way. But the whole project afforded me a chance to expound on the greater state of sports—why we're glued to it on TV, how much thought goes into these productions behind the scenes, and why it's so crucial to us.

What did you do after leaving the University and your post as sports editor and reporter on major sports for the Daily?
I came to New York to write about a rash of topics for magazines—crime, travel, entertainment, anything but politics. But when it came time to write my first book, I went with something I knew front and back. Plus, there was still a sports junkie inside me somewhere. I'll never forget the rush of beating Lake Superior State in overtime at Yost Ice Arena. Or the Fab Five humbling Bobby Knight at Crisler. Or Desmond Howard putting himself vertical in the end zone to grab Elvis Grbac's fourth-quarter touchdown pass against Notre Dame. Man, I hate Notre Dame.

Do you think college sports still offer a 'healthier' alternative to pro sports?
College sports (recent hearings aside) have always represented some measure of athletic purity to me. And I'd gone away from watching pro sports on TV because I knew what sports could be—nothing ever lived up to the sensation of watching a Michigan game with a crowd as dutiful as the seasons. I don't watch sports because I want to see who wins; I watch to feel like a part of something. And I don't think I'm alone.

This may sounds crazy, but I was hoping in some small way that the XFL, in all its purported lunacy, could overturn the current trend in sports toward gloss and glitz, that it could shock the system into some sort of general re-evaluation. Of course, that didn't happen. The whole thing left me with a big empty feeling. Vince McMahon was so blown out by his XFL experience that in the end, he didn't care enough to even put me in a headlock. So be it. If I want some kind of charge from the sporting world, I always know where I can find it.

Top of page