“An American Organization, a Hundred Per Cent”: The Competing Legacies of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, the National Renaissance Party

By Anna Duensing

James Farmer, National Director of CORE

In July 1963, the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized demonstrations in the Bronx to protest hiring discrimination at White Castle hamburger stands. An “undercurrent of racism” existed throughout the North, stressed James Farmer, National Director of CORE.

As if to prove his point, mobs of white hecklers came out in force to harass and attack the picketers. Mostly white youths, “kids looking for kicks or race hate,” in Farmer’s words, they crammed the targeted locations of the restaurant chain. The mob jeered and waved Confederate flags, pelting protestors with eggs, rocks, and hot coffee. WHITE CASTLE NOT BLACK CASTLE, one of their signs proclaimed. Adding to the mounting tension, the New York neo-Nazi group the National Renaissance Party (NRP) arrived one night to distribute their literature, provoking the crowd into a frenzy before fleeing the scene.[1]

The NRP later filed a complaint with the police that CORE members had smashed a window of their truck. Upon searching the vehicle, officers discovered that the White Castle standoff could have been much worse. The truck contained bundles of racist and anti-Semitic literature alongside a cache of weapons, including a cross bow, a buckshot-filled steel billy club rigged with tear gas cartridges, a flare gun, a switchblade, razors, and three hunting knives.

A subsequent search of one NRP member’s home turned up eight rifles, a battle axe, a shotgun, a sawed-off .32 caliber rifle, and “thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.” Eight NRP members, including their leader James Madole, faced charges of advocating criminal anarchy, attempting to riot, and possessing unlicensed firearms.[2]

The NRP grabbed headlines repeatedly throughout the 1950s to 1970s. Most New Yorkers encountered the neo-Nazis as nothing more than a public annoyance. Their ‘mass rallies’ and rabble-rousing were a near-weekly disruption in Yorkville, the Upper East Side district they called home. The NRP’s legacy appears at first to be rather derisory, an obscure grab-bag of sloppy, weird scandals: infighting and rivalry with the American Nazi Party; dabbling in Satanism and the occult; or the suicide of one of their most active members following the dramatic revelation that he was Jewish.

However, the origins, affiliations, and offshoots of the National Renaissance Party are a reminder that they did not operate in fringe isolation. Instead, the NRP thrived within a growing regional and global network of rightwing extremism.

A brief consideration of the Party’s activities and how it was tracked and challenged over the years—by the FBI, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and by grassroots antiracists and antifascists—helps to explain why groups like the NRP endure in the United States and how they might be stopped.

Established in Yorkville in 1949, the National Renaissance Party hoped to revitalize prewar fascist movements. Its local project plotted a militant defense of the neighborhood against encroachment by Puerto Ricans and African Americans and strategized a violent overthrow of the Jewish landlords and liberal politicians they perceived as abetting that shift.

The NRP envisioned innumerable recruits among the working-class white ethnic Yorkville of yore: older generations of Germans, Irish, Hungarians, and Czechs who began to settle there in the mid-19th century. Yorkville, after all, had served as headquarters for the German-American Bund, a prominent pro-Nazi group in the 1930s. The NRP sought to revive these local connections while recruiting anew among the disgruntled white working class.

James Madole—a young, lifelong anti-Semite born in the city and raised in Beacon—quickly emerged as the face of operations. Drawing on his exposure to interwar fascists and the rightwing wartime America First Committee, he merged old American nativism with a globally-attuned white nationalism, assembling a loose confederation of followers which ranged from 50 to 700 people.[3]

Although its public agitation extended across decades, the NRP was most active in the early 1950s. It held at least 70 gatherings between 1952 and 1953, convening on street corners and in rented private halls or slumped over beers in darkened bars. [4] The Party platform called for the elimination of all rights for “minority races” in anticipation of mass deportation, the dismantling of middle-class white liberalism and the “New Deal regime,” and the eventual abolition of parliamentary government altogether. They planned to withdraw from the United Nations, forging alliances against the twin evils of Communism and Zionism with imagined new fascist empires on the horizon in Germany and Japan as well as with Francoist Spain, Peronist Argentina, and any willing dictators in the Arab World.[5]

In addition to rallying, leafleting, and street-fighting locally, the Party cultivated relationships with other neo-Nazis and white nationalists in the U.S. and around the world. Domestically, old darlings included the rightwing “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin and the militant wartime Christian Front, the German-American Bund, and the America Firsters. Although the NRP endorsed hardline Cold War conservatives like Senators Joseph McCarthy and John W. Bricker, they often skirted elected officials, praising and emulating the demagogic legacy of Louisiana populist Huey Long. Disdaining political elitism across the spectrum, Madole argued that “racial pride and racial purity” necessitated “social wealth for the masses.”[6] This commitment, he reasoned, ensured the Party remained “an American organization, a hundred per cent.”[7]

Madole understood this mission as necessarily defensive—against Communists, Jews, African Americans, immigrants, and migrants—and accordingly courted a wide range of allies who shared his sense of threat. One distinguished example was H. Keith Thompson, a corporate lawyer, Yale graduate, and self-described “American Fascist” who had actively been trying to present more respectable airs to match the postwar mood. Thompson appeared at one NRP event as National Director of the “American Committee for the Advancement of Western Culture.”[8] He also served as a Registered Foreign Agent for the Socialist Reich Party of West Germany until it drifted toward open neo-Nazism and was declared unconstitutional in 1952. He defended his position as lawfully in the service of “a legitimate, anti-communist, right-wing political party of West Germany,” decrying attacks by “Jewish Pressure Groups” who acted out of a “blind, anti-German vendetta.”[9]

National Renaissance Party Logo

The NRP pursued other global ties, forged mainly by Madole and an enigmatic member named Emmanuel Trujillo (alias Mana Truhill), who managed the Party’s “Overseas Office.” Their most well-known contact was Einar Åberg, an inveterate Swedish anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.[10] They also corresponded directly with German neo-Nazis, sending literature, seeking advice, and offering to fund new movements by selling outlawed Nazi memorabilia in the United States. In one instance, a German thanked them for sending NRP bulletins, though asked that they refrain from including their eagle and lightning-bolt insignia on the envelopes. “You will understand that I have to reject any political connection to your groups,” he wrote, “but I would still like to remain privately in touch with you and your comrades.” These networks were a source of ideological succor for the NRP, affinities which bolstered its short and long term ambitions by cultivating a sense of shared past while legitimating its imagined future.[11]

The FBI had been tracking Madole since his Beacon days, and in December 1954, the House Un-American Activities Committee singled out the National Renaissance Party in its Preliminary Report on Hate Groups and Neo-Fascists.[12] This was HUAC’s first investigation into rightwing extremism since it had targeted the German-American Bund in 1938. The report introduced the NRP as a prime example of a “neo-fascist organization,” which openly espoused a fascist regime for the United States. The Committee distinguished neo-fascists from their subversive, extreme-right peer the “hate group,” citing as an example the Christian Educational Association and the “vitriolic hate propaganda” of its “allegedly anti-Communist publication” Common Sense.[13] These groups overlapped significantly and both presented problems within American society, but even so, the report’s comparative framing of the National Renaissance Party reveals as much about the Committee’s political orientation as it does about the NRP.

Since the end of World War II, antifascists and their political allies had been pushing for a formal recognition that fascism still posed a threat to American democracy. The HUAC report seemed to initially recognize these appeals in their more liberal form, arguing that fascism, like communism, was a “totalitarian doctrine…basically incompatible with the principles of our Republic.” It went on, however, to minimize the danger of fascism’s postwar echoes and new bedfellows, even suggesting that antifascist concerns were a communist smokescreen. The real danger, HUAC concluded, was that “the appearance of neo-fascist organizations and methods in the postwar period serve only to impede the intelligent, united effort necessary in the current life or death struggle with communism.”[14]

In the Committee’s view, rightwing extremism was not dangerous on its own terms, but rather because it subverted the fight against the “extreme left.” The far right thrived by tapping into “the “deep emotional appeal of the majority of decent citizens,” HUAC argued: “love of God, country, home; or antipathy to communism.” Yet the NRP undermined such “decent” sentiments by “using the divisive tactics of the Communists whom they allegedly deplore.”[15] The danger of neo-fascist and hate groups, then, was that they gave anti-communism, white supremacy, and “100% Americanism” an unabashedly bad name.

Antifascists and civil rights groups perceived the NRP in far clearer and more urgent terms. Forged in the fires of the Popular Front, their criticism and grassroots opposition proved essential to limiting the National Renaissance Party’s reach. Within months of the NRP debut, the Jewish press was on the offensive with printed stories and letters to then New York senator John Foster Dulles to demand action “on the New Nazi Menace in the United States.” Dulles was sympathetic, but argued that while such activity was “reprehensible,” it was not illegal. “If illegality is not involved,” he reasoned, “then it seems to me that the most effective way to cope with the situation is by disclosure of the facts and reliance upon public opinion.”[16]

In New York, the press and local activists took up these tactics in many ways, drawing attention to the NRP’s hostility toward broader civil and human rights struggles. Leftwing groups like the Civil Rights Congress noted Madole’s alleged participation in the infamous white riots against Paul Robeson in Peekskill in 1949. Liberals in the Anti-Defamation League and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League investigated and at times even infiltrated the NRP. The latter group amassed a huge archive of notes, minutes, and NRP literature. Following one five-hour meeting between a League investigator and NRP members, the undercover agent noted bitterly: “THAT’s A LONG TIME TO BE WITH A NAZI. WITHOUT KILLING HIM.”[17] Other groups adopted  more militant approaches of de-platforming and direct action. The Jewish War Veterans in particular took to the streets to verbally and physically disrupt rallies, reminding onlookers who really had won the war.

The desultory federal response to the NRP and other postwar rightwing extremists offers some explanation for why these groups persist. By unequivocally prioritizing communist threats and proffering bothsidesism from the center, elected officials undermined serious, long-term assessments of rightwing and white nationalist movements, downplaying the unrelenting risk they posed. Books by historians Clive Webb, Kathleen Belew, and Kyle Burke have addressed some of the violent repercussions of this policy failure in subsequent decades.

And yet a variety of independent organizations and grassroots initiatives found common cause over the same period in mounting effective, tenacious resistance. Protestors disturbed NRP street rallies and denied them public attention. Businesses refused to host them. Volunteers drafted press releases, pressured politicians, and gathered evidence. In their tireless recognition and critical rejection of fascism in all its dogged, elusive, and opportunistic postwar forms, they took seriously the too-often thin line between kids looking for kicks or race hate.

Anna Duensing is a doctoral candidate in the joint program in History and African American Studies at Yale University specializing in transnational and global histories of antifascism, black radicalism, Holocaust memory, and far-right massive resistance within the long civil rights movement. 

[1] “Picketing by CORE Stirs Riot in Bronx,” New York Times, July 7, 1963; “CORE Plans Fight on Latent Race Hate,” New York Times, July 15, 1963; “Pickets in Bronx Battle Hecklers,” New York Times, July 10, 1963.

[2] “‘Nazi’ Group Is Arrested in the Bronx,” Newsday, July 15, 1963; “8 In Fascist Group Indicted in Bronx,” New York Times, August 16, 1963.

[3] Steven E. Atkins, “The Columbians,” in Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History (Santa Barba: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 89-91; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 72-73.

[4] “Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascists and Hate Groups,” December 17, 1954, Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington D.C., pg. 10.

[5] Report on National Renaissance Meeting, December 16, 1952. Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 343, Folder 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[6] James H. Madole, interview with Gordon D. Hall, August 3, 1967, Voices of Extremism, Milner Library, Illinois State University.

[7] “New Anti-Semitic Publications—From an ADL Report,” Jewish Advocate, September 22, 1949; From Madole’s street speech, October 16, 1953; Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 338, Folder 5; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[8] American Hebrew Article Draft, May 22, 1953; Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 338, Folder 7; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[9] Press Report from Mr. N. Keith Thompson, Jr. August 25, 1953. Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 337, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library; Report on NRP Subversive Status; Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 338, Folder 2; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[10] Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard G. Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 111.

[11] Letter from K. Meissner to Mana Truhill, March 26, 1954; Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 337, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library; Letter from Otto to Mana Truhull, March 14, 1954. Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 337, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library; Letter to members from James Sheldon, April 4, 1950. Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 47, Folder 2; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[12] FBI Memorandum re: Animist Party, April 25, 1947; FBI Memo on NRP, aka “Patriots for McCarthy,” March 25, 1955.

[13] “Hate Peddlers Hit By House Group,” Los Angeles Times December 18, 1954; “Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascists and Hate Groups,” December 17, 1954, Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington D.C., pg. 1.

[14] “Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascists and Hate Groups,” December 17, 1954, Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington D.C., pg. 1.

[15] “Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascists and Hate Groups,” December 17, 1954, Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington D.C., pg. 1.

[16] Letter to Morris Weinberg from John Foster Dulles, August 19, 1949, Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 1, Folder 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[17] Report on Lundorf, August 9, 1953; Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights Records; Box 337, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.