Tag: vote

By Matthew T. Eng, Offbeat NOVA

It’s hard to think of Arlington, Virginia, as a hotbed for hate. Living near it has a remarkably price tag. According to one website, Arlington ranks as the eighth-most expensive city in the United States, with the 2020 cost of living sitting at 53% above the national average.¹ As you drive through its premiere neighborhoods like Bluemont, Clarendon, and Ballston, you realize why it’s one of the most desirable locations to live in not only Northern Virginia, but the entire country. It is only a stone’s throw from DC, the houses are beautiful, and the landscaping is perfect. Where there are no houses, there are meticulously built high-rises and lush public spaces. As they say, location is everything. 

But Arlington has not always been beautiful and perfect. It was know for darker things . . . other things that lived quietly inside its utopian ecosystem like a virus entering a new host.

Arlington was the former epicenter of the Neo-Nazi/white power movement in the United States for over two decades beginning in the early 1960s. Less than two decades after the end of the Second World War, Washington’s premiere suburb became an enclave for a reincarnation of Nazi Germany’s beliefs when George Lincoln Rockwell came into town. For seven years, Rockwell ran the American Nazi Party from his headquarters on 928 N. Randolph Street in the busy Ballston neighborhood of Arlington. He also ran a barracks for his “storm troopers” at the top of the hill in a mansion farm house called “Hatemonger Hill” by local residents. 

It was from there that he drove the short distance to the Dominion Hills Shopping Center to visit the EconoWash laundromat on August 25, 1967. As Rockwell sat in his car, a disgruntled former party member fatally shot him from the roof of the building. Rockwell’s death marked a critical halt in his march towards white racialism at a time when the Civil Rights movement had reached its strongest point. It also stands as a bleak reminder of the resurgence of hatred into modern life today.²

George Lincoln Rockwell was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1918. He lived a privileged childhood, and was talented in many subjects. While studying philosophy at Brown University, Rockwell dropped out of school to accept a commission as an officer in the United States Navy in 1938, just three years removed from the United States’ entry into the conflict. He served as a naval aviator during the Second World War, operating in both the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters. As a lieutenant commander living in San Diego with his family during the Korean War, he became acquainted with Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He also applauded American figures like anti-Communist stalwart Senator Joseph McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur. It was from the latter that he adopted his signature corncob pipe, an accessory he held onto until the day he died. 

Later, he divorced his wife and married another woman with similar interests and sympathies of his own. By 1955, he was back stateside in Washington, D.C., publishing a periodical called U.S. Lady, a magazine made for U.S. service member’s wives that doubled as his mouthpiece for his racist ideologies. His racist attitudes and words grew more vocal and more popular in the latter half of the decade, gaining a following in and around his new home in Arlington County, Virginia. He gathered his thoughts for a new vision of racial purity. He called it the American Nazi Party. By the end of the decade, he had his first headquarters in Arlington inside a brick rambler at 6512 Williamsburg Boulevard. As author Charles S. Clark noted in his exposé on Rockwell, “through the window, neighbors could see his lit-up swastika on a red flag.” The home is now a private residence estimated in value at $758,000.³ 

In 1960, Rockwell’s American Nazi Party moved to a new location at 928 N. Randolph Street, today the site of high-rise apartments. In front of the near-derelict building was a large sign that everyone could read from the road: “White Man…Fight! Smash the Black Revolution Now.” His numbers of followers continued to grow into the early 1960s. He eventually set-up a “stormtrooper barracks” inside a large hilltop farmhouse two miles away from his headquarters at 6150 Wilson Boulevard. Local residents came to call the location “Hatemonger Hill.”⁴ 

The American Nazi Party (ANP) spewed their racist vitriol inside the beltway and beyond. Rockwell used the party as a platform for advocating deporting Black Americans back to Africa, sterilizing Jews, and executing race traitors like President Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren. Famously, Rockwell and several of his followers drove a swastika-clad Volkswagen van from Arlington to New Orleans to protest the “Freedom Rides” like some low-rent, racist pilgrimage to Bonnaroo.⁵ 

Despite their media attention, the ANP was small. One estimate had them numbering only thirty “hardcore followers” and just over three hundred total during the Rockwell era. One of those followers was John Patler, a former United States Marine who was honorably discharged after being arrested at an ANP rally. Born John C. Patsalos, he changed his last name to Patler to sound phonetically like “Hitler.” He joined the party officially in 1960 and served as the editor and cartoonist for the organization’s magazine, Stormtrooper. He was expelled from the group in 1967 for harboring “Bolshevik leanings” after a disagreement with Rockwell over policy. Although Patler claimed he loved Rockwell “like a father,” and he to him “like a son,” Patler grew unwilling to see a world where the two were separated. Rockwell sullied on, spending most of his time atop Hatemonger Hill. Patler festered until the anger, frustration, and disappointment reached a boiling point in the summer of 1967.⁶ 

Around noon on Friday, August 25, 1967, Rockwell went down the hill with his laundry to visit the EconoWash, one of the many establishments in a small strip mall called the Dominion Hills Shopping Center. He was dressed in a white shirt and dark slacks. Parking his 1958 Chevrolet in front of a barber shop owned by Tom Blakeney, the two waved at one another before Rockwell exited his car and entered the laundromat. He appeared moments later, having forgotten his bleach. As he returned to his car, as Tom Blakeney remembers, he heard two shots ring out. “I thought a car had backfired,” he said. He continued: 

“I saw Rockwell kind of jumping around in the front seat, and I thought he was having a seizure. I saw him point at the roof and then slump over the steering wheel.”⁷

Tom Blakeny, Tom’s Barber Shop Owner

Two shots traveled through the windshield. One landed into Rockwell’s heart and the other ricocheted off the seat and into the roof of the vehicle. His car knocked into another nearby vehicle. According to Charles S. Clark, Rockwell “fell and landed face-up in the parking lot, splayed beside his box of Ivory Snow and a copy of the New York Daily News.” The leader of the ANP was gone. A coroner later pronounced him dead at the scene.⁸

Rockwell’s final gesture was for a very good reason. He was pointing at his killer, John Patler. Patler had used the vantage point from the top of the roof of the Dominion Hills Shopping Center to aim down and shoot Rockwell. Patler was a former Marine, who are as a rule expert in their marksmanship. Arlington police arrested the 29-year-old half an hour later on Washington Boulevard. A discarded raincoat and cap believed to be Patler’s was found in a nearby yard, and a German Mauser Semiautomatic pistol was recovered in the water along nearby Four Mile Run below a footbridge. He was convicted of first-degree murder in December 1967, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was later paroled in 1975, serving less than half of his original sentence. As for Rockwell, he was given a military burial at Culpepper National Cemetery. Although the agreement for his military burial stipulated that there be no Nazi insignias to be displayed during his burial, his followers violated these conditions. He was secretly cremated the next day.⁹ 

Today, very little evidence of the assassination exists. There are no historical markings, only businesses that have come and gone since 1967. The facade of the entire complex has changed. The one business that still exists is the barber shop, now called Tom’s Hairstylist & Barber. As of 2010, Tom Blakeney, the original owner, was still alive, retired and living in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Looking through several pictures for references, we were able to pinpoint the exact spot that Rockwell died in August 1967. Neo-Nazi sympathizers have come to the strip mall’s parking lot for years to pay homage to Rockwell. 

Hatemonger Hill, less than a mile away, is now a picnic pavilion where families eat in between trips to the batting cages, mini-golf courses, and swimming pool. The land was demolished and annexed to Upton Hill Regional Park in 1973, as the party members soon lost their lease after Rockwell’s death.¹⁰ 

Unfortunately, Rockwell’s death would not the end of the city’s relationship with hate and division. 

As recently as 2016, Arlington resurfaced again as a nucleus for hate when WTOP reported that alt-right talking head/inauguration punching bag Richard Spencer and the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank, was based in town before moving to neighboring Old Town Alexandria a few years later.¹¹ Charlottesville may be a few hours’ drive from Arlington, but I do not believe what transpired there was  lost on residents who lived through the tumultuous years of the ANP in their city.   

On August 25, 2017, a small group of Nazis showed up to the very spot where Rockwell was killed. Dressed in white shirts, black slacks, and black ties, they paid their respects to the former American Nazi Party leader. A guest at the nearby barber shop took a photo of the six individuals giving the requisite “sieg heil” salute, with one holding a large Nazi flag in the middle. The bottom of the flag touches the asphalt and the darkened motor oil stains left there over the years…well maintained machines slowly oozing out their excess and leaving an indelible mark for future generations. I can think of no better metaphor for the arrogance of the individuals in the photograph. As one Twitter user responded to the photograph with, “I count 6 losers & a flag.”

I understand that journalistic integrity is built on a foundation of objectivity. That is clearly out of the window for this article. It was painful enough to expose the old wounds of such a great city once again, so close to a time when we are all near-broken and politically fragile. So if you are upset with the bias in this article because Offbeat NOVA is taking a political stance against the creeping Kudzu of fascism in the United States, we only have a few words to say. Like Rockwell, there will come a time when the hate will end, either by their own hand or the genuine good of others. 

Today is election day, when the very soul of the nation is at stake. Whether you like it or not, this year is a mirror to Charlottesville in 2017. Arlington in the 1960s. Nuremberg in 1938. But like those other events, those involved will fail. Why? Because in the good words of Woody Guthrie, all you fascists are bound to lose. 

Footnotes:

1.  Kat Tretina, “10 Most Expensive Cities to Live in for 2020,” Education Loan Finance. Accessed November 1, 2020, LINK.
2.  United Press International (UPI), “Rockwell, U.S. Nazi party leader, slain,” United Press International, August 25, 1967. Accessed November 2, 2020, LINK.
3.  Charles S. Clark,”Close-Up Of An American Nazi,” Northern Virginia Magazine, November 28, 2010. Accessed November 2, 2020, LINK.
4.  Clark, “Close-Up;” Mark Jones, “Nazis in Arlington: George Rockwell and the ANP,” WETA Boundary Stones, January 2, 2013. Accessed November 2, 2020, LINK.
5.  Jones, “Nazis in Arlington.” 
6.  Frederick James Simonelli. American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 
7.  Charles S. Clark, “Death of an Arlington Nazi,” Northern Virginia Magazine, December 30, 2010. Accessed November 2, 2020, LINK.
8.  Clark, “Death of An Arlington Nazi;” UPI, “Slain.”
9.  Michel E. Miller, “The shadow of assassinated American Nazi commander hangs over Charlottesville,” The Washington Post, August 21, 2017. Accessed November 2, 2020, LINK.
10.  Mark Jones, Nazis in Arlington.” 
11.  Dick Uliano, “White nationalist, alt-right group calls Arlington home,” WTOP News, November 22, 2016. Accessed November 1, 2020, LINK.