Personal Recruiting for the White Cause

by William White Williams
Chairman, National Alliance

WHAT TYPE OF White people do we most want to join the National Alliance? Dr. William Pierce and I were discussing this question in 1992 when he had just created the position of Membership Coordinator for me. It was my primary task to act as his Executive Officer and recruit and expand the ranks of dues-paying supporters, and organize many of them into Local Units in the areas where we had a half dozen or more people willing to get together as activist cells.

Of course, we wanted to recruit the best of our people — successful people who were looked upon favorably by others. But I still remember that the only two words Dr. Pierce used to describe the type of members he wanted to recruit were serious and sincere. That was so simple and so right. In evaluating aspirants or new members, or existing ones, it was relatively easy to judge their seriousness and sincerity — and therefore their leadership potential.

A member recently brought to my attention a National Alliance BULLETIN from 1984 that I had not seen before. He scanned it and sent it to me. It contains some of the best advice I have ever seen on personal recruiting, and I want to share it with you now. The article begins by describing how to become a mentor:

Imagine you live in one of the parts of this country where floods occur very rarely. You are at work, and suddenly in rushes Dick, the office rookie and a bit of a “jerk.” He says, “Hey, everybody, they’re talking about a flood here this afternoon!” Your very first reaction is, “What? There hasn’t been a flood in these parts for 45 years!” Your second reaction is, “And look who’s saying it. — Dick! I think I’ll wait for some more information before I go home and pack my bags.”

Now alter the scenario: Instead of Dick the rookie, in comes Frank, the office manager. He goes to the middle of the office floor and says, “Everybody please stop what you are doing. I need your attention. The radio has just announced that a flood is heading towards our city.”

Dick is young, green, inexperienced, and not yet respected. He has been late for work several times, has let several people down with promises he could not keep, has had a bill collector call for him at the office, and has no real friends of either sex. When he tries to tell his co-workers something startling, their first reaction is criticism. But when Frank says virtually the same thing, people are inclined to believe him. Why?

Frank is what the Germans call a Respektsperson. He is someone you can respect — not just because he is a superior at work, but also because he is an older, wiser person with experience and maturity under his belt. Even the most startling thing, coming from Frank, seems reasonable.

A person who has respect makes a message credible, no matter how startling. An immature and unsteady person can make even a common statement seem suspect. He tells you it is supposed to rain tomorrow, but you can’t rely on his word, so you check the weather forecast for yourself.

What is the meaning of this for you as an Alliance recruiter? It means that you, the recruiter, must first be a credible person. The workplace is one of the best places to find recruits, because there you get to know people and they get to know you. Are you a credible person at work? Do you show up on time? Do you work well? Do you get along with others, using tact, or are you immature and headstrong? If you exemplify positive attributes, people will respect you and will be inclined to believe your message. If you have a poor reputation with your co-workers, then they will take everything you say with a grain of salt.

The same applies in the family circle. Husbands, are you responsible and manly in your actions? Wives, are you responsible and feminine in your actions? Do you have credibility?

At college or in high school, are you a good student, or are you a “good time Charlie”? If you are a “good time Charlie,” some students may like you, but that does not mean they respect you or that you have credibility.

Fortunately, most Alliance members do have credibility. Dr. Pierce and the Alliance leadership have been intent now for years on recruiting only superior people into our ranks, and on weeding out questionable types.

As a general rule, if you have personal credibility, you can be a successful recruiter, whether you have a “way with words” or not. But if you lack personal integrity, no amount of eloquence can give you success in recruiting members of the quality the Alliance needs, and it is better that you do two things instead: first, work on yourself to become a more credible person; and second, engage only in mass distribution of Alliance materials. Personal recruiting is not yet for you.

What, after all, is the nature of our message? Is it not something startling, like a warning to people on high ground that a flood is coming? Is our message not a demand that people throw out a lifetime of previously held ideas in favor of our own? Are we not saying, “Listen, Pete, I don’t know just how to say this, but everything you have heard about race, democracy, the Jews, and the Second World War was either wrong or distorted. Now I would like you to let me tell you the true story.”

It is clear that only a respected, credible person can get away with something like this. People today are just too skeptical and cynical, too hardboiled and suspicious, to accept the word from some stranger from an unknown group. You must have credibility.

On the other hand, let’s not exaggerate the difficulties. The United States is visibly going to the dogs. Illegal aliens are pouring in by the millions. The Jewish lobby’s existence and power is now known and resented by tens of millions of people. Disgust with politicians is equaled only by disgust with the controlled media. White people know that something is very wrong, and they have a strong suspicion that somebody is not telling the truth. The system, in other words, has begun to lose its credibility. Now, if you, as an Alliance recruiter, can establish your own credibility as a person, then National Vanguard and our other publications can finish off the System’s credibility for good. But it all starts with establishing your own credibility first.

Now, in addition to our online magazine (at nationalvanguard.org) we have our weekly broadcasts of American Dissident Voices, our organizational site natall.com — and, for those who are “high percentage shots” or who may not be on the Internet, there is our excellent booklet, Building a New White World (natall.com/booklet) and our CD series The Power of Truth (natall.com/cd-offer).

Our beautiful National Alliance business cards (natall.com/cards) are always handy for our members to carry everywhere, for placing wherever good White people may find them, or for giving to a prospective member face-to-face when he indicates he is like-minded.

The article goes on to emphasize the importance of status:

Our goal is not just to communicate without being laughed at. Our goal is to recruit, no matter how many months of patient cultivation it takes. In our recruiting we must be mindful of one fact: Our numbers and our resources are few. They are limited. We do not have time to waste on “iffy” prospects, on people who might come around someday if we spend five years talking with them. (Of course, if you are locked in an employment or marriage situation, then spend whatever time is necessary on those about you. You have, after all, no place else to go.)

It is important, in view of our limited strength, that we target only the most likely and best recruits. Now we know what “best” means: good racial stock, sturdy character, intelligence, etc. But who are the most likely recruits?

The answer comes from the nature of the relationship between recruit and recruiter. It is the relationship between a pupil and his or her teacher.

Respect is something which can exist between equals. The recruiter, however, is someone to whom the recruit looks up — someone the recruit accepts as higher, wiser, more informed, and more experienced than he: someone he is willing to accept as a tutor, a guide, a mentor.

It has to be said that no society is more status conscious than a middle-class society. There is, after all, no hereditary aristocracy — and America certainly has no true intellectual aristocracy to whom the masses look up. What people respect in a middle-class or bourgeois society such as ours, and what they look up to, is success in mundane things, status in the everyday aspects of life. If you have a Mercedes, the man in the Buick will look up to you — sad, but true. If you have a house, and he has a smaller house or an apartment, he will look up to you. If you went to Harvard, and he went to French Lick Community College, he will mentally tip his hat in your presence.

Furthermore, if you are married with children, and he is married with no children, he may well admire you as someone further along in life, particularly if your children are comely and well behaved. If he is single, and you are merely married without offspring, you still have “one leg up” on him.

If you are his boss or of higher rank or bigger or better looking or richer or bolder or luckier, he is more likely to look up to you and give additional credence to what you say. It is sad that today people have no moral and spiritual betters to look to, but the desire to look to one’s apparent betters is a deeply ingrained, natural phenomenon which is found in all social animals.

In our recruiting, let us never forget that we must deal with people as they are. Once they are recruited, we can better them. But the fact is that your ideas from National Vanguard, by themselves, is not what will convert them. It is you and your status advantage over them. Your status advantage, your position as a mentor, is what will open the door. If you have not opened the door, you can talk all you want, and the object of your attentions will just become annoyed.

The practical implication of these long known insights is that you should, in your own personal recruiting, target those individuals who are at most equal to you, and preferably below you, in status. Think over in your mind, “Who am I better educated, more highly ranked, more affluent, older, wiser, or generally more successful than?” This group contains your most likely recruits.

Of course, we are using some “psychology” here. But we have to — the Enemy certainly is using psychology. It is no accident that the ranks of the psychologists and psychiatrists are full of Rosenbaums and Goldenzweigs. The Enemy’s use of the media involves all sorts of psychological tricks — including the careful cultivation of “credible” spokesmen and insidious appeals to the average person’s status consciousness. Because the ideological battle is being fought on both a factual and an emotional level, we also must become students of mankind, connoisseurs of “what makes people tick” and appraisers of character.

It really comes down to what was touched on in the previous BULLETIN: Recruiting is like spiritual parenthood. If your own children look up to you, they will listen to your words. So find the people who already look up to you — repeat, already look up to you — and give them the benefit of your words. And do it with the confidence that you are an agent of the Creator’s purpose in a world darkened by ignorance.

We have some truly outstanding people in our ranks now, but not enough.

One of my attorney friends read the words I’ll quote below to me the other day. It’s an excerpt from a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt while in France in 1910.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

“The man in the arena” typifies the sort of bold, dedicated Alliance member needed today in these desperate times. He is serious and he is sincere. You will know him when you see him. He “spends himself in a worthy cause.”

Can there be a cause more worthy, more noble, more necessary than our cause?

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Source: National Alliance BULLETIN