Minisode: The Real Earl Turner

Before we leave the novels of William Luther Pierce behind us, let's take a quick look at the real Earl Turner. The protagonist of The Turner Diaries was, like all of Pierce's characters, named after a real guy he knew.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. We are moving on this week. I
swear this week's regular episode isn't about Joseph Paul Franklin
or Willie Muther Peers or the Turner Diaries or any
of that. I promise we're done with that for now.

(00:27):
But before we leave them behind, I just had to
tell you one more thing, just a quick note. Earl
Turner was a real guy, kind of anyway. Timothy McVeigh
blew up a federal building trying to imitate Earl Turner.

(00:48):
Robert Matthews formed the Order in an effort to bring
the novels events to life. But before any of that,
before the book was published, there was a real Earl.
William Luther Pierce named almost every character in his two
novels after people he knew in real life, and Earl

(01:10):
Turner was no exception. I'd always read that Earle was
the name of his secretary in the early National Alliance days,
but that's all anyone ever said, Earl who Surely there's
an answer to this question. The name turned out to

(01:32):
be not that hard to find, although the man himself
has proven to be a little more elusive. His name
was Earl Woosley Thomas junior. He died in Maryland in
twenty twenty three, just a few months shy of his
eightieth birthday. Earle joined the American Nazi Party in the

(01:55):
nineteen sixties when he was a young man in his twenties.
I couldn't tell you exactly what year he joined, but
I suspect he was very deeply involved by nineteen sixty five.
A story shared by one of his old associates describes
an incident in which Earl and another Stormtrooper were arrested

(02:17):
for spraying red paint on some anti war activists, but
the charges were later dropped. It doesn't say when this happened,
or where or who was sprayed, but that is a
significant number of specific details. Right, two arrested, charges dropped
red paint, anti war protest and I found one incident

(02:41):
that matches those details. He was in August of nineteen
sixty five. Newspaper accounts don't actually name the two Nazis
who were arrested, and neither does the issue of Stormtrooper
magazine that describes the incident. But the men who were
soaked and paint are actually very famous. Labor lawyer Stawton Lynde,

(03:07):
student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses and pacifist activist
David Dellinger. I suppose it is possible that Earl through
paint on a different Pacifist on some other day, but
that was the only story I found that fit. Later

(03:27):
on in his career as a Nazi, Earl was one
of several longtime members who left the organization with William
Luther Pierce in nineteen seventy after his big falling out
with Matias Kale, the man who took over the party
after George Lincoln Rockwell's death. Between accounts from former members
and references in FBI files, it looks like Earl worked

(03:49):
for William Luther Peers for a few years after that,
following him from the National Socialist White People's Party to
the National Youth Alliance and staying on with Pierce as
he founded the National Alliance in nineteen seventy four. H
Michael Barrett, Earl's roommate from his American Nazi Party days,
has written on several occasions that Earle quote got out

(04:12):
of politics after that. That's not entirely true, but I'm
still working on nailing down the specifics of exactly how
terribly untrue, that is, but this old Nazi roommate of
Earls did supply by way of his long online posting history,
some of the details I needed to confirm other things

(04:34):
about Earl, like his career in publishing. Earl W. Thomas
Junior is the American copyright holder on two English translations
of works by the infamous French Holocaust denire Paul Rossigner.
Under the pseudonym Wayland Smith. He holds a copyright for
a text called Richard Wagner Alberic Loki and the Jews.

(05:00):
I don't know exactly what that is, but a copy
of it is held in a collection called Anti Semitica
at the University of Florida's Special Collections Library, so we
can guess. The pseudonym Wayland Smith is obviously a bit
tongue in cheek. It's a reference to an unfinished opera
libretto by Wagner based on the Germanic folk legend of Wayland,

(05:23):
the Blacksmith. Earl's publishing company, Bibliophile Legion Books, published one
of his own books too, an out of print text
called The History of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
In postage stamps and postal stationary. It sounds thrilling, and
I did try to find a copy, but I came
up empty. All I found were some old Usenet posts

(05:46):
in a group for people who collect postage stamps from
Nazi Germany, and they were complaining that the book is
impossible to find. Curiously, in an interview given by Barrett
that old roommate of Earls, Earl is described as a
federal employee. I know he was in the Air Force

(06:11):
in the early sixties. I doubt he stayed on in
the military, but if he moved to the DC suburbs,
maybe he did work for the federal government. I don't
know what kind of work he did, or for how long,
or if H. Michael Barrett is even telling the truth here,
But if Earle worked for the government, that would explain

(06:32):
why his name is completely absent from old party newsletters.
I mean, if he was an original card carrying member
of Rockwell's American Nazi Party and he'd been arrested in
service of the party, it is odd that his name
never shows up in an issue of Stormtrooper magazine. I
couldn't find a trace of him if he were trying

(06:54):
to stay off his employer's radar, though. That makes a
little more sense, and that might be why it's been
such an uphill battle to find much of anything about
who Earl Woosley Thomas Junior was. Outside of his filings
with the US Copyright Office. He's a bit of a ghost.

(07:15):
According to H. Michael Barrett, though Earle loved Bruce Lee movies,
the only record he could remember Earle buying during the
years they lived together was Simon and Garfunkele and Earle
loved tuna casserole. He loved it so much that Barrett
could recite Earl's recipe from memory even decades later. He

(07:37):
apparently preferred his canned tuna packed in oil not water.
There are a lot of blank spots in the notes
I've started for Earle. I'll probably come back to him
one of these days. Maybe there are some clues in
the novel he wrote. Back in the nineteen seventies, William

(07:58):
Luther Pierce borrowed Earl name for the protagonist of The
Turner Diaries, a novel Pierce published under a pseudonym, and
just two years before Earl Thomas died, he published a
novel of his own under a pseudonym, And I'm waiting
for my copy to come in the mail. Just a

(08:21):
quick announcement before you go. I'm planning on doing another
Q and A episode soon, hopefully in the first week
of May, so I can take a few days off
to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. You guys were so
patient with me last year. You endured two reruns in
a row while I got married and took my honeymoon.
I don't plan on making a big deal out of

(08:41):
it every year. Don't worry. It's just kind of special
the first time you have an anniversary. You know. I
don't intend to make you listen to a rerun this
time around, but a fun little Q and A episode
gives me a little breathing room. And you guys always
have so many more questions that I know what to
do with, and some of them are really fun. So

(09:02):
you can make your way on over to the Weird
Little Guy's subreddit and add your question to the Q
and A thread that I'll set up over there, or
you can email me your questions directly at Weird Little
Guys podcast at gmail dot com. Weird Little Guys it

(09:30):
say production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Part executive producers
are Sophie Lichtreman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.

(09:50):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys