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Willis Allison Carto (July 17, 1926 – October 26, 2015) was an American far-right political activist. He described himself as a Jeffersonian and a populist, but was primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. Throughout his life, Carto established and controlled a variety of right-wing organizations and periodicals, most significantly the Liberty Lobby. An intensely private person despite his influence, he remains little known and had a reputation as a "shadowy" figure even among other right-wing activists. Extremism scholar George Michael, the author of a biography of Carto, argued that despite his public obscurity, Carto was "undoubtedly the central figure in the post-World War II American far right".
Carto ran a group supporting segregationist George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign and reorganized the group into the National Youth Alliance, later taken over by Carto's associate William Luther Pierce and turned into the National Alliance. Carto founded the Holocaust denial organization the Institute for Historical Review, though later lost control of the organization in a dispute. Carto helped found the Populist Party, which served as an electoral vehicle for white supremacists. He also ran the far-right periodicals The Spotlight and later the American Free Press.
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.
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.
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 HSBC Finance, a loan company. While at this job he began working as a political organizer, first entering the right-wing political scene in 1952. Carto met Willis Stone, a right-wing activist and the founder of the Liberty Amendment Group. Stone introduced Carto to Aldrich Blake, the founder of Liberty and Property. Blake recruited Carto to work on an anti-racial integration publication, The Job Can Be Done!, published in 1954, and followed it with similar publications. The next year, Blake decided to give control of Liberty and Property to Carto, who was substantially younger than him, who proceeded to incorporate the organization.
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 ; 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 Holocaust denial.
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.
On September 10, 1971, the conservative magazine National Review published a detailed critique of Carto's activities up to that point. It was titled "Liberty Lobby - Willis Carto and his Fronts". 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.
The law firm of Robert Von Esch Jr., representing the defendants, settled with the plaintiff to remove themselves from the case by agreeing to pay $100,000 and an explicit apology for having filed an August 1986 libel suit by the IHR against Mermelstein. The Von Esches also formally acknowledged that Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz and that millions of Jews had perished in German wartime camps. On September 19, 1991, the plaintiffs withdrew complaints of libel, conspiracy to inflict emotional distress and intentional infliction of emotional distress, following Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stephen Lachs' dismissal of the malicious prosecution portion of the case.
In 1984, Carto was involved in starting a new political party called the Populist Party, combining various far right groups. Carto was the chairman of the party's Program Committee and avoided the public spotlight in this venture and was never formally the leader of the party. Several white supremacists were involved in the party, with its first chairman, Robert Weems, being a leading member of the Ku Klux Klan, though many in the white supremacist movement refused to be involved. The party ran a presidential ticket with Bob Richards that same year. A schism emerged, with Carto's schism eventually outlasting the other faction and coming to reinstate the original platform. The party ran several white supremacist candidates, including, in 1988, David Duke, who Carto admired. In 1989, the party schismed again, and in the early 1990s Carto ceased involvement with any form of the Populist Party.
After The Spotlight became defunct, Carto and several Spotlight staff members and writers subsequently founded a new newspaper called American Free Press. It is otherwise basically identical to The Spotlight.
In 2004, Carto joined in signing David Duke's New Orleans Protocol on behalf of American Free Press. The New Orleans Protocol sought to "mainstream our cause" by reducing internecine warfare. 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.
Willis Carto was a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, a far-rightist who heralded Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as the "European Imperium" against both Bolsheviks 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."
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