00:00:01 Speaker 1: Hey everybody, it's Clay Newcomb. Thank you so much for tuning in to Bear Grease. We're doing things a little bit different. This episode that we're about to listen to is called Con Man, Asa Carter, Part 2, and it was originally released on May 3rd, 2023. This Con Man series was one of my favorite series that we did that year, and it's worth going back to. This final conclusion of the Con Man series dives deep into Asa Carter's life, and there's just some astonishing stuff inside of there that's guaranteed to surprise you. Thank you so much. I hope your fall is going great, and I hope that you enjoy Con Man, Asa Carter Part 2. 00:00:50 Speaker 2: I started going door to door, trying to find out something about the most famous writer in this area, a man named Asa Carter, roll onto the pen name of Forrest Carter. She said, get out of here and don't come back. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: This is part two of our con man series on the double life of Asa Forrest Carter. We're diving into the gritty details of the violence, hate, and conspiracy philosophies that themed the first 45 years of his life and how in the last decade of his life, he transformed into an unrecognizable Cherokee Indian author who wanted to be America's next Hemingway. And he almost did it. Once again, author of Unmasking the Klansman, Dr. Dan T. Carter, and Steve Rinella of Meat Eater lead the way. 00:01:39 Speaker 3: As my guests. 00:01:41 Speaker 1: Brace yourself because our windy trail will be treacherous as we'll talk about the beating of jazz singer Nat King Cole, read from the Unabomber's Manifesto, and we'll begin to understand how Asa Carter did what he did. We're going neck deep into the mind of a con man. For real, I don't think you're going to want to miss this one. 00:02:03 Speaker 3: If he was shooting to instill racial hatred, he missed the mark. If he was shooting to make you love your grandparents... Yeah. 00:02:20 Speaker 1: My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Brought to you by Tecova's Boots. I'm a cowboy boot man, and I've been wearing Tecova's for years. They're the most comfortable boot I've ever put on. Good boots for good times. 00:02:54 Speaker 2: While I was in the middle of doing my research on the Wallace biography, George Wallace, I watched the educational little tree climb from being a university press book with 5,000, printing of 5,000 books. Suddenly it was 100,000, 200,000, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list. And as I considered it, I was probably more indignant than I should have been. I thought, this is a guy, this is a liar. And I read the book. I thought there's nothing wrong with the book, but there is something wrong with claiming to be some Native American, having an Indian ancestry, and using it to sell your book. So I contacted the New York Times, and actually when I first contacted them, they didn't believe me. They said, no, he has a long record as a novelist. So I sent them a statement from the– the ambulance driver, he died in 1979 in Abilene after a biblical death that I describe in the book. And he was shipped out of Abilene by air as Forrest Carter and the hearse driver I talked to said, all I know is that when he arrived, he was Forrest Carter, and when I buried him, he was Asa Carter. 00:04:21 Speaker 1: That was Dr. Dan T. Carter. He's no relation to Asa. And on episode one of our Cotton Man series, we dove deep into the contents of a book published in 1976 called The Education of Little Tree, written by a man who claimed he was a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter, and his book was semi-autobiographical. It's brilliant prose about an orphan Native American boy raised by his grandparents while being taught moral lessons about life through their connection to the land and the people in their community. It gives poignant insight into empathy, love, and integrity towards all shades of people except politicians, the government, and anything organized and institutionalized by man, which all these things are inherently corrupt. This all sounds pretty reasonable. Moonshining, deer hunting, fox hunting with hounds, predator-prey relationships, turkey trapping, mules, whooper wheel lore, and how to tell when a watermelon is ripe is all in the book too. It teems with the rich mountain culture of the Great Depression-era impoverished southern Appalachia. However, there's a catch that was relatively unknown until 1991 when a New York Times article by Dr. Dan T. Carter, who we just talked to, exposed the author as Asa Carter, and he wasn't a Cherokee Indian, but he was an ardent white supremacist considered radical even by others in the movement. He was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan under constant surveillance from the FBI. He was involved in several acts of violence, and he was a speechwriter for Alabama Governor George Wallace. Asa Carter was a con man. He was a professional white supremacist dedicated to his craft. He was a wordsmith, an orator, an actor. He had an IQ of 138, and some considered him a media and marketing genius. 00:06:25 Speaker 4: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. 00:06:31 Speaker 1: Whoo! Those famous words spoken by George Wallace were written by Asa Carter. Today, there is a 1,000-page FBI folder holding all the surveillance done on Asa. He was suspicioned to be a dangerous man. Is that why he had to change his identity? But the latter part of his life, his writing, did that evidence a changed man? We're contrasting the two external data points we have on his life. Number one, a brilliant book of empathy to Native Americans. And number two, a professional life dedicated to racial supremacy. Racism is typically rooted in a desire to preserve one's culture at the detriment of another. It's the manifestation of a fear and insecurity, but it's also misguided love of one's own culture. But loving your culture isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd say most people of the world appreciate their culture. But if we're trying to really understand who Asa Carter was, I think we've got to see and acknowledge the mechanics at play. In Asa's case, he was very interested in preserving the Anglo-Saxon South, which he believed had been taken advantage of in the post-Civil War Reconstruction, which isn't an outlandish statement. However, the philosophy of his hate preyed on people's bitterness, weakness, and fear. The rudimentary, carnal, corrupt ideology produced nothing but more brokenness. What makes crazy men so dangerous is how close they are to being incredibly normal. I'd also like to say that I'm not telling this story to demonize the South, nor suggest that we're a bunch of racists down here. On the contrary. This story is so extreme, it stands out like a strutting gobbler in a wheat field. To say that the South hasn't massively moved forward in racial reconciliation since the Jim Crow days would be inaccurate. And it would be as inaccurate to say that racism doesn't exist here in 2023. And I think stories like this are important to talk about. I think it helps us understand where some of this stuff comes from and how to fix it. It's important to remember that Asa Carter died at the age of 54 in 1979, the year I was born. So we're just guessing about his motivations. Here's Dr. Dan T. Carter, who I'm going to call Dan to keep things simple on this podcast, who is now 81 years old and sharp as a tack. He's going to tell us about his on-the-ground research on Asa in the 1990s. 00:09:21 Speaker 5: Well, the summer of 1991, when, um, the posthumous book, the educational literary became so popular. 00:09:31 Speaker 2: I thought I got to find out something about this guy. So, uh, uh, I had been in Alabama doing a lot of research and I drove up to Anniston, went to the local library. They were very helpful, but I couldn't, I couldn't exactly find out where he lived. Uh, I knew the area, um, Darmanville, it was called in rural area there. So I drove out there. My wife was with me and, I think I could be a con man, I guess. I was never dishonest with anybody. But I would always say I'd go up to doors. I went to several small businesses there and said, I'm trying to find out something about the most famous writer in this area, a man named Asa Carter wrote under the pen name of Forrest Carter. And everybody either claimed they didn't know anything. But then I started going door to door. 00:10:30 Speaker 3: This is real journalism. 00:10:32 Speaker 2: And a fair number of people didn't know. They were younger. 00:10:36 Speaker 3: They didn't know. 00:10:37 Speaker 2: But it was older people. I started to say almost, but without exception. They either became hostile or they wouldn't talk to me. And years later, when I got the FBI files, I found out why. The local community resented the fact that when he was active as a right-wing radio announcer and everything, lived there, he was under constant suspicion by the FBI. They were constantly monitoring. They'd follow him. They'd park at the end of his driveway. And this is the middle of the civil rights movement. These people didn't like government people anyway. And they saw this kind of persecution of their hometown boy. So I finally found a small engine shop, and I talked to the guy. He said, I don't know anything about him, what he did. He just didn't want to talk to me. And as I left, one of the mechanics, an older guy, walked out behind, and he motioned me over. And I went over and he said, listen, I wasn't one of Asa's boys, he said. Boys, part of his clan group. But he said, I know a boy, he said, who's real good friends with Asa's son, Asa Jr. And I said, I'll tell you how to find his house. So I drove up there, went inside, talked to his wife first. And she got her husband. She was cheerful and everything. And he came down and I explained what I wanted. He didn't say a word. He went back upstairs. I could hear him on the phone, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. And his wife was kind of embarrassed. She said, I don't know what's going on. So she walked up the stairs to the top of the stairs for a minute. She came running down the stairs. She said, get out of here right now. And I said, what do you mean? She said, get out of here and don't come back. And I don't know what he was promising to do, but it clearly was not a good idea to stay there. So I left and he came running out on the porch just as I drove off. 00:12:38 Speaker 1: He was hot. Dan would later receive some veiled threats of violence from others after his New York Times story broke. Neighbors standing up for the reputation of neighbors is conceivable, but so was violence in the stratosphere of Asa Carter. On April 10, 1956, jazz singer Nat King Cole was attacked on stage in Birmingham, Alabama, and members of Ace's Ku Klux Klan group did it. 00:13:08 Speaker 6: Well, they say that the reason those men attacked you was because of a feeling against rock and roll music and Negro music, so-called. 00:13:18 Speaker 3: Now, what do you feel about that? 00:13:20 Speaker 6: Well, I mean, if that was the case, then I'm the wrong guy. You're not rock and roll? 00:13:24 Speaker 5: I don't think so. I think if you heard me before, I'm sure you wouldn't ask me that if you heard me before. 00:13:29 Speaker 2: What do you know what rock and roll is? 00:13:34 Speaker 1: That was Nat King Cole being interviewed about the attack. The Klan was very concerned about the racial crossover popularity of black musicians and the dangerous craze of rock and roll music. Six men were arrested for the attack, and Asa Carter would set up a legal defense fund for them, declaring them political prisoners. Asa was incredibly media savvy and knew how to turn a story. In a non-related incident, Asa would be accused but acquitted of shooting two men with a. 44 Magnum at a Klan meeting in downtown Birmingham. These men had accused him of stealing money, and he shot them. Lots of people saw it happen, but nobody would talk against Asa, so they had no evidence. But it's widely believed that he did shoot these men. But let's get back to Dan being in Alabama in the early 1990s trying to learn about Asa. 00:14:32 Speaker 3: I asked him. 00:14:33 Speaker 1: How Asa could have pulled off this double life so well. 00:14:38 Speaker 2: It's partly the power of his skills. When he was in high school, I interviewed one of his high school friends. And he was in a high school play. And this classmate of his said, it was embarrassing. And I said, because he was bad. He said, no, it's because the rest of these were high school kids. And he was like a Hollywood actor. He was totally at ease on the stage. His lines were delivered like a professional actor. And it made it awkward to watch, you know. So from the very beginning, he had these skills. When he decided after he got out of the Navy to go to the University of Colorado, he had done his naval training there during the war. He graduated from high school, but it was some rural high school in Alabama. And the entrance person at the University of Colorado, well, I don't know about this, so would you mind taking an IQ test? He's 138. So there was never any doubt about how really smart he was. He made a lot of political misjudgments, but in terms of intelligence, he was very capable and a great performer. 00:15:56 Speaker 1: He was like a Hollywood actor. Asa was gifted with words, with reading people, and had instinctual insight into the way humans operated, what compelled them, what scared them, what moved them. Most dynamic leaders have this capability. He knew what people wanted to hear. Here's Dan with some of Asa's deep background. 00:16:20 Speaker 2: Asa Carter had a background very much like mine. He grew up on a small farm in northeast Alabama near Anniston. And there's no evidence at all during his high school years from his classmates that that he was anything other than a typical white Southern boy. I mean, sure, all of us of that generation, his generation, and even up to mine, were unconsciously racist. But he wasn't, there's nothing to indicate he was virulent about it at all or even obsessed about it. So there was nothing, you know, in his early childhood that indicated this. And then he had some traumatic event. He enlisted in the Navy in the officer training program. in 1943, and he flunked out. Not because he wasn't smart, but because he was, he went to a rural high school that just did not prepare him for the rigorous kind of program involving mathematics and other things. He just didn't have the background. And it really embittered him. And he was now 18, almost 19 years old. He goes in the Navy, he becomes a radio operator, a very courageous one. He serves in combat, but While he's on a ship in the Pacific, he meets a small group of people who are studying a series of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-black writers. Gerald L.K. Smith names it. You might not be familiar with the day, but were really big in the 1930s and 40s. Many of them growing out of the fascist movement of the 1930s. And they couldn't talk about it during the war. Obviously, we were all in the war against it, but secretly, many of them really, really supported Hitler. And they were fine with the war against Japan. That was why Carter always said, I was glad to fight the Japs, but I didn't want to fight my Aryan brothers. And he became obsessed with this during the time he was in the Navy. And that was a turning point in his life. Think about it, for most of us young people, and I know this from studies as well, that your real political outlook, if you have a political outlook, is often shaped 18, 19, 20, when you're becoming an adult. That's exactly the time for him. And then from then on, he was one of these, what's the word for it, autodidact, in which you teach yourself. He read, he had a brilliant IQ. He read, but he read exclusively English. in two kinds of literature. One was fascist literature, anti-Semitic literature. The other was this veneration for the Confederacy. He worshipped the Confederacy and saw in not the fancy Confederates like Robert E. Lee and these, but in the tobacco-chewing kind of people like Nathan Bedford Forrest, who could barely read and write, but thought like... to maintain the white South in the Confederacy. And these became his heroes. And he gradually developed a whole way of appealing to people. He started out as a radio announcer in Denver after the war. Then he worked in Yazoo City, Mississippi a little while. And then he was hired and given a radio program that gradually spread to a network. 00:19:59 Speaker 4: In 1865, this state right here, after the war between the states, was occupied by a federal army. In one year, they confiscated 190,000 farms and homes from these poor. 00:20:10 Speaker 6: Old redneck great granddaddies of ours. 00:20:13 Speaker 4: But they refused to integrate. They refused to cooperate. In 1874, they whipped them. They whipped them. 00:20:22 Speaker 1: That was the voice of Asa. 00:20:27 Speaker 2: I've listened to many of his broadcasts. and he was really good. He's quite different from many of the broadcasters of the period who were stentorian and what today makes you kind of cringe to listen to them. They had this kind of booming voice in which everything was overly dramatized. That's not the way he was. He acted like he was your uncle who sat down and just talk casually to you. 00:20:57 Speaker 3: So it was different. 00:20:58 Speaker 1: It was a different frequency that people could connect to maybe more than they ever had. 00:21:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, and he was so good at a kind of folksy style in which he would tell stories about, most of them made up, but about his past or about other people. And then he would always link it back to the threat. He was smart enough to realize that anti-Semitism, particularly after the Holocaust and the news about the Holocaust, didn't play very well. That didn't mean it wasn't there. There were a large number of Americans who were still anti-Jewish, but he realized it was kind of the third rail. So he didn't talk about that much on his radio show. What he did discover was the great weapon that white supremacists had in the South, anti-communism. because the anti-communist fervor of the 1940s and 1950s explodes with McCarthyism. And what white Southerners immediately realized, because there were some savvy politicians, was we have to convince white Americans outside the South that all the civil rights stuff is being formatted by the Communists. 00:22:14 Speaker 7: In the South, we have 98%... Anglo-Saxon races, not counting the. These are the responsible people who erect free governments and who have stood up and told the, you must operate, you must conduct yourself from a separate state. But the Communist says, one world government, one world economy, one world geography, and a one world race. 00:22:47 Speaker 3: Those are heavy words. 00:22:49 Speaker 1: It's hard to reconcile that he's the guy that wrote The Education of Littletree. The political play was to say that the communists were behind the civil rights movement. Whether he believed that or not, we don't really know. Some evidence would later suggest that he didn't believe that at all, but it was just a political strategy. What many have since said is that Ace's public career in media was him playing an exaggerated character that he believed the South wanted. And therein lies the problem with political leaders and most media personalities. They've got to get ratings and votes so they do what sells. And like a nasty social media algorithm, they give the people their base-level desires of what they think they want. Do you realize how nasty and dirty social media algorithms are? They'll feed you and your kids filth and tell you it's a favor. And media and politics do the same thing. Do you see these reoccurring themes in American politics? Here's Dan on anti-communism. 00:23:58 Speaker 2: And that became the theme, his theme, and that of other right-wing radio broadcasters, not only Southern, but Northern as well. that the Communist Party is maneuvering these people, that they're not smart enough to do it on their own. And in their publications, as opposed to their sort of inner publication, is really the Jews that were behind it. And it would sort of be on the periphery all the time, so that, for example, in his broadcast and the broadcast of many of these people, they would often emphasize the Jewish names behind of individuals who supported civil rights. Because it was true, and as a whole, Jewish Americans were a group that were much more supportive of African Americans than generally white Americans were. So he was able to get away with it mostly. He did run into a problem in 1955. He overstepped himself. And on a radio broadcast, he talked about the Jews and their role. in formatting this. And actually, it was a group of white businessmen who were closely tied to the Jewish community in Birmingham who said to his sponsors, you've got to get rid of this guy. And they succeeded. And that just reinforced his belief the Jews were behind. They fired me from my job. He later... ended up doing other radio broadcasts, but never as successfully as he originally was. 00:25:36 Speaker 1: Asa became so radical that he outpaced his peers. But deep down, he believed the Jews were behind the civil rights movement, and they intended to deconstruct the current South. What's odd to me is it seems like a lot of people were interested in deconstructing the South. Here's an interesting observation from Steve Rinella about Ace's book, The Education of Littletree. Some of this just doesn't make any sense. 00:26:04 Speaker 3: Here's another one I stumbled over. Knowing about the presumptive feelings of this Klansman, and their antipathy and hatred of Jews and religious persecution of Jews. So here I'm reading The Education of Littletree, and there's a storekeeper that treats these guys very well. And one might look and be like, oh, of course, they evade the Jew, the storekeeper. There's a storekeeper who's Jewish. Littletree overhears someone refer to him as a Jew and mentions his stinginess. Littletree goes on to say, Mr. Wine was not stingy. He was thrifty and paid his obligations and seen that his money was used in the right manner. Later, he says he's worried about this. And he says to his grandpa, what is a Jew? you okay so you're like so as the reader I'm like what's grandpa gonna say now knowing that here's this we have a Klansman espousing his beliefs what a grandpa's answer be grandpa just says I don't know something is said about him in the Bible somewheres or other must go back a long ways like the Indian I hear tell they ain't got no nation either end of story as political rhetoric what is that gaining The primary character, Little Tree, is introduced to a person who stereotypes this individual. He's a Jewish stingy. And they spend a lot of time talking about the difference between stingy and thrifty. Stingy, you just hoard things. Thrifty, you have things that matter. So you don't spend on things that are frivolous because you want to focus on things that matter. This is a conversation they've had. This guy's not stingy, he's thrifty. He just wants to know where his money's going. 00:27:49 Speaker 1: It seems like it would have been an easy spot to... Throw him under the bus if he wanted to. Yeah. Once again, we're conflicted with the first version of Ace's life compared to the presumed life of a man that could write The Education of Littletree. Does that make any sense to you? Doesn't to me. Just to clarify the timeline, Asa Carter's life as a professional racial supremacist media personality was in the 1950s into the early 1970s. Asa ran for governor of Alabama in 1970 against George Wallace. On a platform so radical, George Wallace was the moderate candidate. He claimed that Wallace had left the cause and Asa's message that had been so well received for 20 years was now obsolete. It didn't jive with the voters of Alabama, and he received 1.6% of the statewide vote. Here's Steve with an interesting tidbit on Ace's political career. 00:28:58 Speaker 3: This is another thing people got to go back to their history books to study up on. These guys are all Democrats. 00:29:03 Speaker 2: Right. 00:29:04 Speaker 3: He he was trying to get the Democratic nomination for governor. And he was running. He was running as being an absolutist on segregation. 00:29:14 Speaker 2: Wow. 00:29:15 Speaker 3: Listen, I keep like as we're talking, I keep warming up to the to the idea that there's just like a like a unstable hand here. 00:29:24 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:29:24 Speaker 3: But then you get into this. How could you write so tightly and so beautifully? 00:29:30 Speaker 1: It was after the devastating loss of this political race for governor that Asa began writing the novels he'd always wanted to write. He knew he'd never get political. as Asa Carter, so he changed his name to Bedford Forrest Carter, which eventually just became Forrest Carter. And FYI, Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who would later renounce his involvement in the Klan. We mentioned him before on our episode about Hulk Collier. Here's Dan with more details of Ace's identity switch. So with that change of identity, obviously in public, like if he's talking to Barbara Walters, he's going to speak like Forrest Carter, look like Forrest Carter. Did he maintain that identity throughout his whole life during that period? 00:30:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Was he married? 00:30:23 Speaker 3: What about his, he was married to, his wife's name was India. 00:30:26 Speaker 2: That's right. 00:30:26 Speaker 3: Is that correct? When, when did he marry her? 00:30:30 Speaker 2: He married her right out of, uh, the Navy in 1947. Okay. So she was here for this whole thing. Oh yeah. Yeah. And she was, she was very much his supporter and played along with the whole thing. Uh, she didn't even, she lived, uh, they bought a house through, uh, as I described in the book, um, through a flukish set of circumstances. Um, He came into some money and he bought a house down in St. George Island and she lived down there. But he spent most of his time in Abilene. 00:31:04 Speaker 1: He came into some money. In 1972, Asa wrote his first novel under the alias Forrest Carter, which he titled Gone to Texas. And the movie rights to the book were purchased by Clint Eastwood, and he made it into his breakout movie, The Outlaw Josie Wales. And this part is absolutely wild, almost unbelievable. But knowing that he was being tracked by the FBI, Asa went to the FBI office and told them how to get in touch with him if they needed him because he was about to, quote, make some money for the first time in my life, and I don't want anything to screw it up. This is a direct quote from the over 1,000-page FBI file on Asa. He then moved to Abilene, Texas. At this point, he called his sons nephews, he grew a mustache, grew out his sideburns, wore a cowboy hat, and became a new-age Cherokee Indian writer. But he had some help with this new story. 00:32:08 Speaker 2: All of that was made possible. because of one man, a man named Don Josie, who was a wealthy, wealthy Texas oil millionaire who had given a lot of money to George Wallace. And Carter had met him, and they just became like brothers. And when Carter contacted him in 1971 and said, look, I want to change my identity and move to Texas. And the two of them came up with this background story. Don Josie would meet with Newsman when he first started trying to promote his book and say, yeah, he worked for me for 25 years as a Bronco buster. And Don Josie owned several ranches. He said he was here and there and wherever. Okay. 00:32:54 Speaker 1: So he had an accomplice. 00:32:55 Speaker 2: He had an accomplice who set up the background story for him. Okay. And so when anybody asked about, well, why didn't we hear this guy? This guy is, you know. All these years, and he came up with these stories about how he was a storyteller to the Cherokee Nation. Well, it's just strange. Nobody went back here to North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and said, can you tell us about this? Nobody ever checked in. It's partly the power of his skills. 00:33:28 Speaker 1: Asa had skills. The release of the book The Outlaw Josie Wales and Eastwood making the movie was the beginning point of his new life. What's interesting is that Asa's life mirrors the plot of this movie almost to the T. Josie Wales is a Confederate soldier who won't give in to the ideology of a reconstructed South. Asa made a living talking about rejecting Reconstruction and how the South got the shaft. Josie Wells leaves the South under persecution from the Yankee Army and heads to Texas. Asa, under the persecution of the establishment, left the South and headed to Texas. Josie Wells, in the movie, makes a new life with the Comanches in Texas. Asa becomes Forrest Carter, the Cherokee Indian, and has a completely new life in Texas. Is that not wild?! It's hard to know if this guy is crazy or a genius. Now, we're going to have to hold it together and stay on track. We're talking about a lot of different books and a lot of moving parts. It's a complicated story, bros. This is Bear Grease. Now, we're going to talk to Steve about Asa's later book, the 1976 book, The Education of Littletree. This book was even later in the progression of the Forrest Carter character. I have a question for Steve about how intentional the message of that book was, or was he just writing the book he thought people would like? What I would ask too is if he was writing this book, would his value system just be found inside the way that he would tell the story that he was interested in? Or did he really write this book with the intention of creating people that were deeply anti-government? And it's like, how intentional was it? 00:35:26 Speaker 3: If when I hear in my understanding of not being a subject matter expert, When I hear a segregationist Klansman, I think of someone who is deeply invested in racial hate. 00:35:38 Speaker 7: Okay? 00:35:39 Speaker 3: That's what I get. I don't think I'm going out on a limb here. 00:35:42 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:35:43 Speaker 3: If that's what he was shooting for in this book, he missed the mark. 00:35:48 Speaker 1: Right. 00:35:48 Speaker 3: If for some reason he had gotten where he was just anti-establishment, he just wanted to see the whole thing burn down, sure. If you told me the Unabomber wrote that book, okay? 00:35:58 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:36:00 Speaker 3: What the Unabomber, the Unabomber was a radical environmentalist and he was anti-establishment. 00:36:05 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:36:06 Speaker 3: If you told me that the Unabomber wrote that novel, now a bunch of people are going to fly off the handle. They haven't read the Unabomber's manifesto. I've read the Unabomber's manifesto. So if you're feeling like insulted right now, or that I'm saying something naughty, I know what I'm talking about. And if you read the Unabomber's manifesto, you'll see what I'm talking about. If you told me the Unabomber wrote that book, I would buy it. 00:36:26 Speaker 6: Really? 00:36:26 Speaker 3: If you told me a Klansman wrote that book, even though we know it's true, I would initially be like, I don't get it. If he was shooting to instill racial hatred, he missed the mark. If he was shooting to make you love your grandparents... Yeah. That's why the more I think about it, my wife's idea that maybe the guy. 00:36:50 Speaker 1: Steve said he would have believed it if the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, wrote this book, The Education of Littletree. Expounding on this is a bit like chasing the distant gobble from a bird you know you can't kill, but we're going to do it anyway. Kaczynski terrorized America by sending bombs in the mail to random people for 20 years. The FBI had over 150 people working full time trying to find out who he was. In 1995, he wrote an anonymous 35,000 word manifesto demanding it be published or he'd send more bombs. He wanted to, quote, overthrow the economic and technical foundation of modern society and to protect wilderness, which is the antithesis of technology. Here is an excerpt from his manifesto, which was published in the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995. Let me know if this sounds reasonable to you. Modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulation, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires. The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural patterns of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. It can't function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn't natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples, the things that the children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits. just the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society, children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly. Because of the constant pressure the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society's requirements. Welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts, and resistors of various kinds. 00:39:52 Speaker 4: Wow. 00:39:53 Speaker 1: Now I can see what Steve meant when he said the Unabomber could have written the education of Little Tree. And now you can say that you've heard part of the Unabomber's manifesto, and it caught you and me both by surprise. Remember what I said about the trouble with some crazy folks is that they're often really close to making rational arguments that make a lot of sense? Yep, we said that. Here is a throat punch question for Steve Rinella on Ace's writing. What in the heck was he trying to say? 00:40:29 Speaker 3: Man, knowing what we now know, I got two ideas about it. You asked me how I became introduced to the book. I was in a class about political rhetoric. We read works from people who had like an ax to grind. And one day he gives us educational literature. As far as I can remember, he probably gave us two nights to read it. We all come in and we talk about the book for a while. Everybody's kind of blown away about the book. This is pre-internet, so you can't look stuff up good. And he says, what would you think if I told you that was written by a Klansman? What does that change? Now, to answer that, I want to point out a thing that I also became aware of in college. We were introduced to a lot of theories of literary criticisms. You can read a text, a book, you could read this book and apply a Marxist criticism to it. Meaning you're going to read this book and we're going to look at how money, how does money influence behavior? 00:41:23 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:41:24 Speaker 3: How does like the big man eat up the little man? 00:41:27 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:41:28 Speaker 3: Let's say we're going to look at it from a, a feminist perspective. What is the role of the grandmother? Okay. Why do, when certain things are happening, the boy and the grandfather go and do them, but the grandmother doesn't participate? What does she do while they're gone? And we'll look at this whole book just in gender. 00:41:45 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:41:46 Speaker 3: That'd be like feminist criticism. But there's this other idea in criticism. It was popularized by this guy, Roland Barts, who was a philosopher and critic. And he brought up this additional way to look at a book, which is called Death of the Author, to look at art or books or whatever. 00:42:01 Speaker 6: Meaning? 00:42:01 Speaker 2: Meaning? 00:42:02 Speaker 3: A text is only itself. It doesn't matter what the author meant. The author's biography doesn't matter. The author's background doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The text is itself. The text is its own living, breathing thing. Don't burden it with what someone meant, right? 00:42:21 Speaker 2: Right. 00:42:21 Speaker 3: When a song means something to you, okay, let's say you listen to a song. A song means something to you and it feels a certain way. And then someone says, oh, no, that's not what it's about. If you listen to the lyrics carefully and then you watch this interview with the songwriter, you'll see that it's not about heartbreak. It's about his mom. The death of the author stuff would be like, that doesn't change it. When I hear it, that's how I feel. That's what it made me think of. I don't care what he thought. He has nothing to do with this. It's a thing. It's a piece of art. And it's my interpretation of it. And all that is just extra. So if we look at this book that way, you can't help but think it's about all the things you and I were talking about earlier. There is a lot to be said about environmentalism and how you view and respect nature. There's a lot to be said about the obligations you have to the people around you. There's a lot to be said by selfless giving, generosity, right? Tons of that stuff to be said. But when we bring the author back into it, which is kind of what you're getting at, we bring this Klansman, this segregationist Klansman author back into it. And you're like, well, what was it all about? There's three takes. One is my wife's idea. I'm going to tell it to you and I'm going to leave it hanging. One take is that he changed. He was wrong. This is his apology. One take is that he didn't change at all. And he is a something of an anarchist. He despises the U.S. 00:43:47 Speaker 1: Government. 00:43:48 Speaker 3: He despises Catholicism. Has a real axe to grind with organized religion. Doesn't like the education system he's an anarchist when i recently emailed with the teacher that taught it he pointed out there's a lot to be found in here around things that you might consider that don't tread on me movement anything organized anything establishment should be torn down okay maybe that's what he meant but if that's what he meant and this is a clan text there's some parts that are really hard to get your head around. One of the first things that happens in the book is they get on a bus. The grandfather gets the boy. They get on a bus. 00:44:28 Speaker 1: Opening scene. 00:44:29 Speaker 3: The opening scene. They step onto a bus and the bus driver, keep in mind, this is in the 70s and we're talking about a bus. 00:44:36 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:44:37 Speaker 3: People getting on buses and Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement and how you're seated on a bus, what your interactions with the person driving the bus are is in here. Little Tree and his grandfather get on the bus. The bus driver makes a joke to everybody on the bus and says, how? And everybody on the bus has a laugh. 00:44:56 Speaker 1: Cherokee greeting, like hi. 00:44:58 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:44:58 Speaker 3: A big, loud, sarcastic Cherokee greeting of how directed toward the people on the bus who all laugh at the Indians. It makes them feel very awkward to pay and makes it painful for them to count out and pay the bus fare. And that's like some low, that's loaded. And it's not about whites. It's about the treatment of Indians. What's more, there's a part in the book where Grandpa is relating a story that happens to his father. And his father had, it's like a parable about the Reconstruction South. And in it, Union soldiers, Union soldiers, kill a black man. It is like when you look at it, like never minding the death of the author thing and just taking educational little tree as this thing, which is very hard, admittedly, very hard to do, knowing what we know about the individual who wrote it. And it's a clan thing. It's a segregationist thing. It's very complicated if that's the case. My professor that I emailed with, he pointed out, if you do look at it as political rhetoric, he's not preaching to the choir, right? He's taking... People from the environmental movement. He's taking people who feel Native Americans were brutalized by the US federal government He's drawing an audience here. This was on Oprah prior to the revelation about the author This was on like this sort of like formalized book list. Yeah library shelf of Oprah Winfrey in the early 90s Okay, is it so like seditious that it's taking an audience of the environmental movement back to the Landers and hippies, people who sympathize with the native American movement in the seventies, he's introducing them to anti-establishment. He's introducing them to the idea that their government is evil. Like, is he that shrewd? Can I do the third one? 00:46:55 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:46:56 Speaker 3: My wife's like, maybe he's schizophrenic. Did you know in real life, he at one point in time had his kids stop acting like he was their father. He wanted them to treat him as though he was their uncle. 00:47:06 Speaker 5: Hmm. 00:47:07 Speaker 3: He died in complications of getting into a big fight, physical fight with his kid. You look at the bio and you see that there's a person who struggled with mental illness. 00:47:16 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:47:17 Speaker 3: Maybe we're trying to go like, well, maybe he meant this. Maybe, you know, we're playing checkers and he's playing chess. Yeah. 00:47:24 Speaker 5: Right? 00:47:25 Speaker 1: Maybe he was just straight up crazy. 00:47:26 Speaker 3: Maybe he's nuts. He's schizophrenic. He's nuts. He doesn't know what he thinks. He can't hold his family life together. He's like, and he's not the first insane person to be a great writer. 00:47:36 Speaker 1: At all. Yeah. 00:47:39 Speaker 4: Man. 00:47:40 Speaker 1: I guess this brings up the question of what is the definition of being crazy. At an external level, this guy was incredibly intact. However, we know that he craved attention, the limelight. He was an incredibly good liar, but maybe his motivations were much more simple. I asked Dan the same thing I asked Steve and got an interesting answer. So here's Here's the big question. This is the reason I came to North Carolina. Why did Asa Carter write this book? 00:48:13 Speaker 2: That's a simple answer. Asa Carter became disillusioned with politics. Not only did he realize that he was losing the battle against integration, but he realized his brand of politics was never going to fly. He made a very conscious decision. He told, I interviewed his lawyer, and he said, you know, I'm going to make some money. I've struggled a lot. And he had good periods, bad periods, but he said, I'm going to make some money. I'm going to be the next Hemingway. Well, he wasn't the next Hemingway, but he was. He actually had ambition. He always had ambitions. And so he had really clearly in his mind the outlaw Jersey Williams. That grew out of his research and writing about Jesse and Frank James because he saw them as Confederate heroes because, you know, they were marauders and then became outlaws and so on. And he tried to claim they weren't outlaws. So I understood that about the outlaw Josie Wales and the second book. But the Indian thing, it was only as I began to dig into it that I really began to understand He was drawn to Indians and cowboys for a lot of reasons, but Indians in particular, because he saw Native Americans and their struggle to maintain their way of life against a vicious and murderous national government army as analogous to his struggle to maintain white Southern culture. And in some ways, it was much safer to write about Indians being oppressed than white Southerners being oppressed. 00:50:09 Speaker 1: Now, would that, do you think he actually thought that that would translate to people? 00:50:14 Speaker 3: Because that wouldn't be. 00:50:15 Speaker 2: No, no, but to him it was. 00:50:17 Speaker 1: Just deep, some need inside of him. 00:50:20 Speaker 2: I don't think he thought most people would see it that way. The other thing is, he was always attracted to the whole story of Native Americans, and I think it was part of that generational thing, you know, And that is true, that Americans became much more attracted to Native Americans once they were gone. They were gone. It was just like this mythical thing that they were. He somehow grasped that at a very early age. I was reading this interview. I mean, I thought of it as something growing out of the 60s or 70s. And Fred Berger, this guy that I'm really indebted to, he died suddenly of a heart attack. But he had interviewed a lot of people. But he interviewed one of his shipmates, a guy named Gordon Lackey, who was his closest friend when he was in the Navy in World War II. And it turned out he told the whole story of Littletree when he was 18 years old. It's a story. He just said, I grew up with my grandpa was a Cherokee American. And he told the story of Littletree. 00:51:27 Speaker 1: As if it was him. 00:51:28 Speaker 2: Like he lied to these guys. Yeah, he lied to this guy. And Lackey said, when Fred interviewed him, he said, you know, I thought maybe it was a bulls * * t here. But he said, then most of us were in the Navy, you know, when we talked to each other. But it was fascinating to me that at age 18, he already had the basic outlines of that story. And it was just waiting. And he didn't begin writing that until later. But his earlier stuff, he began writing. He had piles of manuscripts, his friend said. Back in the 1950s and 60s, he was writing. So he was always, he wanted to be a novelist. It was just at this break, when he decided to break from his political past, that it gave him an opportunity to become that writer. 00:52:18 Speaker 1: That's interesting. But I have a bigger question for Dan. So when you have a story like this, someone writes something later in their life. Like we know that George Wallace would later like ask for forgiveness for a lot of the stuff that he did and go on this reconciliation tour and do all this stuff. Some people would read into him writing this empathetic book towards native Americans and say that he was just a changed man. In the book, you say that he maintained being a racist his whole life. Now, how do, how do we know that? 00:52:53 Speaker 2: Well, he had a, several friends in Texas who did not know who he was. They knew him as far as Carter. One of them was a woman named Louise Green, who had been a radio television personality there, and was a really interesting woman. I interviewed her at some length. She was very close to Carter. She came to terms with the fact that he was not who he said he was. 00:53:19 Speaker 3: After his death. 00:53:19 Speaker 2: After his death. I was the one that told her he wasn't. And She said what broke my heart about him was that in many ways he was a fascinating individual and she loved to be with him. I mean, he was just a great person to be around when he was in the Forrest Carter persona. But she said what would happen with, by this time, by the time she knew, he was struggling with alcohol. And what would happen was when he got drunk, out it would come. And the last time she saw him, was very shortly before his death, they went out to dinner in Abilene. And she was worried because he was drinking too much. And this black couple came in. And he started raging about he wasn't going to eat. We're a bunch of using the N word. It went on and on and on. And she kept trying to get him to stop. She said, you know, not only is it not the way I feel, I live here and I'm here. You're saying all this loudly so everybody can see it. And people think I believe this. And he wouldn't, she said he wouldn't stop. And she got up and left. And that was the last time she saw him alive. 00:54:38 Speaker 1: Wow. 00:54:39 Speaker 2: And it was just, to her, it was heartbreaking because it was, to her, it was an individual who had such incredible skills as a writer and but also this personality which would have allowed him, as she said, to do such great things. And yet something went awry at a very young age that sent him this way. 00:55:06 Speaker 1: Do you think that he would be classified as some type of mental illness today, schizophrenia or bipolar or something? 00:55:15 Speaker 2: I don't think it would be hard to classify it. It's the kind of fanaticism we see in a lot of people. It is interesting to me that his sister, who loved him very much, but who totally disagreed with him, she was chief of psychiatric nurses at the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital. And she loved her brother, but she sat down with him on one occasion and tried to persuade him to see somebody for psychiatric help. And he never spoke to her again. He just cut himself off completely. So whether it was mental illness or a diagnosable mental illness, it clearly was a kind of compulsion and a kind of fanaticism that went to the very core of who he was. And the interviews with his nephew and niece were most useful because they spent a lot of time with him. And they talked about how he could be wonderful. He was funny. He would play the guitar with his brother and sister-in-law, and they would sing songs, and he'd tell stories. And then something would, like a switch would go off. And he would, particularly if you crossed him and you contradicted him, and he would become furious then. And as both his niece and his nephew said, he could be scary. Asa Forrest Carter lived a life of drama and violence. His death was even more so. For years, we knew that there were suspicious circumstances. I mean, this was common knowledge at the time, that he died and the official autopsy showed that he died of being unable to regurgitate food. He choked to death on it. But there were also rumors that that something terrible had happened at his son's home, but no one could tell exactly what happened. And in 1991, I'm not tooting my own horn here, but I went out to Abilene, and I met Judge Samuel Matter, and I told him what I was interested in and had written him ahead of time. And he got the sealed police report out, which had been sealed since no charges were ever brought And he found a way for me to get access to it, even though it was sealed. 00:57:55 Speaker 1: So you had to read the book to find out. 00:57:57 Speaker 2: And if you want to find out his death, which, as I said, certainly has kind of biblical overtones, just read the story of Cain and Abel. You read the book. 00:58:13 Speaker 7: Well, I am just an old rebel. 00:58:14 Speaker 6: Reckon that is all I am. For this carpet bag of government, I do not give a dead blame. I'm glad I fit again it. I'll keep fighting. 00:58:23 Speaker 1: Till we won. 00:58:25 Speaker 6: And I don't want no pardon for nothing that I done. No, I don't want no pardon for what I was nor what I am. And I won't be reconstructed. And I don't give a dead blame. This is Asa Carter. May God bless you. And I thank you for listening. 00:59:00 Speaker 2: Dr. 00:59:00 Speaker 1: Dan T. Carter's book, Unmasking the Klansman, was published in April 2023. You can find it on Amazon and just about anywhere books are sold. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Be sure to listen to the undercover agent who's been assigned to play the long game on me, Brent Reeves, and his new podcast, This Country Life. It's on the Bear Grease feed. And one day, when I'm busted for crimes I've never committed, it'll make a great story. In the meantime, check out This Country Life, released every Friday on the Bear Grease podcast feed. And... Be sure to check out First Light's new trace pant and jacket system for lightweight, breathable hunting gear for the South. I look forward to talking to all the folks on the Bear Grease Render next week. 00:59:53 Speaker 3: Talk to you soon.