Willis Carto (1926-2015) and the Origins of the National Alliance
by Volker Zorn
IN 1968, Alabama Governor George Wallace mounted a presidential campaign as an independent candidate, opposing both the Republicans and the Democrats. Wallace presented himself as a disguised racialist, who would recapture the federal government from the traitors and “pointy-headed intellectuals and bureaucrats with their briefcases” and reinstitute a White Constitutional republic. (ILLUSTRATION: Willis Carto)
It was all a lie: Wallace was just a two-bit political huckster bent on riding a massive wave of White discontent over the direction the country was heading. But nevertheless, his campaign released and focused White resentment and anger as never before in the modern era.Willis Carto was a shrewd judge of human character, and he knew that Wallace was a false White Messiah. But he saw a wonderful opportunity to harness the tremendous racial energy that Wallace had unleashed.
Carto founded the “Youth for Wallace,” as an independent adjunct to the official Wallace movement. The goal was to amass a huge mailing list of young racially conscious White people who were attracted to the Wallace campaign, and to use that mailing list for a post-electoral effort. And this he did.
Following the election, he transformed the YFW into a new organization: the National Youth Alliance. He recruited Dr. Revilo Oliver to help him in the new enterprise. Carto had had a personal connection with the deceased neo-fascist ideologist Francis Parker Yockey, and was the publisher of a popular edition of Yockey’s 1948 masterwork: Imperium: The Philosophy of Politics and History. Because of this connection, Carto used Yockey’s thought as the ideological basis of the NYA. Yockey was not really a racialist as we consider the term today: Rather than a racialism rooted in biological reality, he championed a wispy, insubstantial “spiritual” racial ideology. Oliver was not especially enthusiastic about Yockeyism, but went along with it, later explaining that Yockey’s thought was “the best option open to us at the time.”
Carto’s NYA never went very far. He published one issue of a newspaper called Attack!, held a few meetings and distributed copies of Imperium. Within a year, the NYA was moribund.
Enter Dr. William Luther Pierce, who had recently split with Matt Koehl’s National Socialist White People’s Party, of which he had been the National Secretary and head of public outreach. Suddenly a new option was available! Dr. Pierce was intent on forming an new pro-NS organization. Carto wanted someone capable of reviving the NYA. He brought Dr. Pierce on board in 1970 for that purpose.
Both Willis Carto and Dr. Pierce can accurately be described as alpha males. Just as in a wolfpack, the NYA could be led by only one alpha. After a brief but bitter struggle, Dr. Pierce prevailed, and detached the NYA from the Carto empire. The first thing that Dr. Pierce did was to jettison the Yockey ideology, and put the resurrected NYA on a firm footing of reality-based biological racialism.
In 1974, the NYA was reorganized as the National Alliance.
If Carto’s NYA had not been available, Dr. Pierce would have certainly founded a brand-new group, with a different name. But having the NYA as a base or framework upon which to build sped up and facilitated Dr. Pierce’s work.
The internecine struggle of the early 1970s is now far behind us. Willis Carto had made his peace with the NA years ago. He may be honored today for the pivotal role he played in laying the organizational groundwork for the greater things that came to pass.
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Source: White Biocentrism
For further reading:
Annual MLK Message: No King Over Us 2025
Rock Island, Illinois: National Alliance Fliers Make an Impression
Cosmotheism is the Meaning of Life
Progress: The William Luther Pierce Memorial Library and Research Center
On Goals
William Pierce's National Socialist "What We Stand For"
Rudyard Kipling: White Man's Poet
Alien Nation
I dissent. On Wallace’s worst day, he was a thousand times better than anything that could be found in Washington city—the hateful city on the Potomac.
JFK romanced the Klan to secure the solid South, then turned on the folk like a rabid dog. And he got the same medicine Lincoln did. That goes for Bobby Kennedy too.
Wallace was shot up badly by a Yankee Jew but was able to live for many years after. That proves that Wallace had hidden strength where his enemies had none.
There is a mistake in my article: the actual phrase used by George Corley Wallace was “pointy-headed intellectuals and bureaucrats with their briefcases.”
But I was not wrong in my characterization of Wallace as a racial fraud. Anyone familiar with his later years knows that once his political career was over, that he explicitly repudiated all racialism in the name of the sweet Lord Jesus.
Yes, he stood in the doorway–but just long enough to let the newspaper photographers get his picture. Then he stood aside. He is the symbol of everything that has been wrong with post-World War II White political leadership in the US.
Wallace’s phrase in the article has been corrected. Thank you, Mr. Zorn.
To blame Lincoln’s eternal Yankee dictatorship on Wallace doesn’t pass the laugh test. Wallace was not perfect, but considering he was physically sick the last years of his life, compromised with drugs and freaks whispering in his ear, Mr. Wallace held up pretty good.
“Willis Carto was a shrewd judge of human character, and he knew that Wallace was a false White Messiah” What did Carto see in Wallace, that showed his true colors? For example, did Carto say how he figured out what was Wallace was about?
Dan: What did Carto see in Wallace…?
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Mr. Zorn hit on what Carto saw in Wallace: the substantial mailing list of like-minded followers of the American Independent Party in his 1968 presidential bid. That’s what he saw.