A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America by Elinor Langer

Abstract

AHundredLittle Hitlers:TheDeath ofa BlackMan, theTrial ofaWhite Racist, and theRise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America By Elinor Langer Metropolitan Books, New York, 2003; paperback ed., Picador USA, New York, 2004. Notes, index. 413 pages. $26.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Reviewed by Lauren Kessler University ofOregon, Eugene Elinor Langer's A Hundred LittleHitlers begins with amurder. InNovember 1988, on a dark street corner in southeast Port land, three skinheads? members of a local neo-Nazi group called East SideWhite Pride ? bludgeoned and beat to death an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw. Langer, a Portlander and theauthor of a biography of the left-wing writer and journalist Josephine Herbst, was, shocked by this brutal incident, as were most Oregonians at the time. For her the con nection was not only geographic and personal ? the lives of the three skinheads intersected with hers inodd ways ? but also visceral.As she writes, "theword Nazi tolls fora Jewdifferently than itdoes forothers" (p. 3). Tomake sense of thissenseless actbut,more importantly,to tryto learn something about the movement that it seemed to exemplify,Langer focused her prodigious researchand journalistic skillson this local story.Firstwriting a lengthy investigativepiece forThe Nation (July16-23, 1990), Langer then continued her research for more than a decade toproduce A Hundred Little Hitlers. Based on thousands of pages of official documents, from Portland Police Bureau files to civil and criminal case files,videotapes, press coverage, and scores of interviews and corre spondence, thebook isboth a grippingnarrative of the crime and the events leading up to itand a deeply disturbing account of thehistoryof the skinhead movement. The book succeeds on three levels.First, it is a highly readable, compelling work of narrative history. For non-scholars ? and for scholars weary of trudgingthroughdense academic tomes ? itisan easy read on a tough subject, a serious book that wears itsresearch lightly. Second, it is amodel of how local history can and should be used: a small storytold in the serviceof amuch largerissue. It isthroughthisone eventon a street inPortland thatLanger reachesout toencompass and make sense of the entire neo-Nazi movement in America. As a research technique and as a storytellingstrategy, this works well. Finally,as a work of sociocultural history,thebook illustrates how history isnot a two-dimensional, linearpro gressionbut rathera complex, three-dimensional tapestry. Langer effectively identifies, details, and then interweavesthevarious elementsofpopular culture thatcame togethertocreate the skinhead movement. Just as amix of politics, music, drugs, fashion, and lifestyle forged the anti-racist,pas sivist, countercultural movement of the 1960s, so too those same basic elements coalesced to form an almost diametrically opposite movement in the 1980s. Where A Hundred LittleHitlers falls short is in itsexploration of the legal maneuverings that follow the murder. Part of thiscomes fromprob lems constructing a strong narrative. The cast of characters is just too vast tobe comprehensible, and Langer spends toomuch timedetailing the personal histories of twowildly idiosyncratic men ? Morris Dees, thehead of the Southern PovertyLaw Center, andAryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger, who were locked in an odd and convoluted civil lawsuit that stemmed from the murder. The bigger problem isthattheevidence does not solidly support Langer 'scritique of the Reviews 155 police and criminal justice system thatunder lies the second half of thebook. Still, this is an important and compelling work of narrative history that, as Adam Hochschild writes in a blurb on the back cover, "illuminates a whole moral universe." The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography By Elizabeth Jacobs, edited by William R. Seaburg Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2004. Illustrations, notes, references, index. 272 pages. $21.95 paper. Reviewed by Rick Minor Heritage Research Associates, Inc., Eugene, Oregon ONE OF THE MOST COMPLETE and mOSt accessible accounts ofNative American mythology and folklore fromwestern Oregon was recorded fromNehalem Tillamook infor mant Clara Pearson by Elizabeth Derr Jacobs inSeptember 1934.Pearson's storieswere edited by Elizabeth Jacobs'shusband, Melville Jacobs, an anthropological linguistat theUniversity of Washington, and published by theUniversity ofOregon Press in 1959 asNehalem Tillamook Tales (reprinted in 1990 by Oregon StateUni versity Press). Elizabeth Jacobs also collected ethnographic information on theNehalem Til lamooks? thenorthernmost subgroup of the Tillamook people of thenorth-central Oregon coast ? from Clara Pearson during interviews conducted inNovember and December 1933at Garibaldi, Oregon...