WEBVTT - Klan Camp 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:09.560 Cool Zone Media. The sun was already starting to set 0:00:09.880 --> 0:00:11.920 by the time the couple pulled up outside of their 0:00:11.960 --> 0:00:16.520 apartment on November sixth, nineteen eighty seven. This trip to 0:00:16.560 --> 0:00:20.200 Mexico had initially been pitched to Sheila as a honeymoon, 0:00:21.640 --> 0:00:24.320 but they'd been staying in this little xpac community outside 0:00:24.320 --> 0:00:28.560 of Guadalajara for more than six months. She was young 0:00:29.000 --> 0:00:32.239 and in love, and she'd adjusted easily to her new 0:00:32.320 --> 0:00:35.000 role as the stepmother to her husband's seven year old 0:00:35.080 --> 0:00:40.120 daughter from a prior marriage, but she was so terribly 0:00:40.159 --> 0:00:45.400 worried about crime. She and her husband just didn't trust Mexicans, 0:00:46.400 --> 0:00:48.960 so they rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of their little 0:00:49.000 --> 0:00:55.200 neighborhood of white Americans. That evening, Sheila went straight inside 0:00:55.240 --> 0:00:58.360 and started bustling around the kitchen, preparing to get started 0:00:58.360 --> 0:01:01.880 on making dinner. With the groceries just picked up. She 0:01:01.960 --> 0:01:04.080 was standing at the scenk looking out the kitchen window 0:01:04.120 --> 0:01:07.440 to see what was taking her husband so long when 0:01:07.440 --> 0:01:12.800 she saw her worst fear. A gang of Mexican bandits 0:01:12.840 --> 0:01:16.319 was assaulting her husband. They were holding him face down 0:01:16.360 --> 0:01:19.959 on the hood of the car at gunpoint. At least 0:01:20.600 --> 0:01:23.640 that's what she told a Mexican judge she thought she 0:01:23.720 --> 0:01:29.440 saw through the window. She claimed the officers with the 0:01:29.520 --> 0:01:34.560 Mexican Federal Police never identified themselves. She never would have 0:01:34.600 --> 0:01:37.280 fired on them if she'd known they were police officers, 0:01:38.880 --> 0:01:42.440 and maybe the judge believed her, or maybe they just 0:01:42.520 --> 0:01:45.680 wanted to be rid of her. She spent just ten 0:01:45.760 --> 0:01:47.919 days in a Mexican jail before all of her charges 0:01:47.920 --> 0:01:51.600 were dropped. The officer she'd shot three times in the 0:01:51.640 --> 0:01:55.040 torso was still in the hospital in critical condition. When 0:01:55.080 --> 0:02:00.960 Sheila was deported back to the United States, she rejoined 0:02:00.960 --> 0:02:04.920 her husband, who was being held on some very serious 0:02:04.960 --> 0:02:09.359 federal charges. That's why they'd been hiding out in Mexico. 0:02:10.760 --> 0:02:14.400 It wasn't an extended honeymoon. Her husband was on the 0:02:14.480 --> 0:02:19.800 FBI's most wanted list. Of course, Louis Beane was no 0:02:19.880 --> 0:02:23.040 stranger to a courtroom, and he would end up wriggling 0:02:23.040 --> 0:02:25.560 his way out of those sedition charges in nineteen eighty eight, 0:02:26.760 --> 0:02:30.600 just like he always did. Nothing ever, seemed to stick 0:02:30.639 --> 0:02:33.919 to him, not even that time. He hosted a boy 0:02:33.960 --> 0:02:37.600 scout camp where his klansmen taught teenage boys how to 0:02:37.639 --> 0:03:03.040 decapitate communists. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys. 0:02:51.080 --> 0:03:06.399 A lot of what we know about what was happening 0:03:06.440 --> 0:03:10.600 on Lewis Bem's paramilitary training compound outside Houston comes for 0:03:10.680 --> 0:03:14.520 a lawsuit that was filed in nineteen eighty one. The 0:03:14.560 --> 0:03:18.360 suit was filed by the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association against Lewis 0:03:18.400 --> 0:03:20.880 Bean and his Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. 0:03:22.760 --> 0:03:26.840 By the late nineteen seventies, there were significant communities of 0:03:26.919 --> 0:03:30.280 Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who had settled in the Gulf 0:03:30.280 --> 0:03:36.200 Coast area. The climate was similar and there were opportunities 0:03:36.200 --> 0:03:39.000 there for fishing and crabbing, which was how many of 0:03:39.000 --> 0:03:41.600 those refugees had fed their families back home in Vietnam 0:03:41.640 --> 0:03:46.400 before the war. The story of the Texas clans war 0:03:46.440 --> 0:03:50.520 with the fishermen comes later, though. But if the Klan 0:03:50.760 --> 0:03:54.880 being weird near Galveston was sounding familiar to you, that's 0:03:54.880 --> 0:04:00.000 probably why the clans escalating confrontations and threats against the 0:04:00.160 --> 0:04:04.400 fishermen and the subsequent lawsuit are what made that compound famous, 0:04:05.480 --> 0:04:08.040 and the injunction in that lawsuit is what ultimately shut 0:04:08.040 --> 0:04:11.120 the camp down and made Lewis Bean so bad that 0:04:11.160 --> 0:04:15.600 he left Texas entirely for a while, but that didn't 0:04:15.640 --> 0:04:20.960 really get going until nineteen eighty one, and locals knew 0:04:21.000 --> 0:04:23.840 what was going on at that camp in the fall 0:04:23.920 --> 0:04:30.520 of nineteen eighty. You see, sometimes I just want to 0:04:30.560 --> 0:04:34.920 tell you guys one funny little anecdote, but I can't 0:04:34.960 --> 0:04:38.200 just drop you off in the middle of a guy's life. 0:04:38.320 --> 0:04:40.480 You would have so many questions about how we got there. 0:04:41.560 --> 0:04:45.640 But it's summertime. A lot of you have kids who 0:04:45.720 --> 0:04:48.799 aren't in school this month. Maybe you've got them signed 0:04:48.839 --> 0:04:52.120 up for some kind of camp, some educational program. Maybe 0:04:52.120 --> 0:04:55.000 they're going to spend some time out in nature, learn 0:04:55.080 --> 0:04:59.479 some new skills, make some new friends. And this seasonal 0:04:59.520 --> 0:05:03.080 shift reminded me of the time a bunch of teenage 0:05:03.080 --> 0:05:06.640 boys got sent off to what their mothers believed was 0:05:06.680 --> 0:05:11.160 a perfectly normal boy scout camp, only to find out 0:05:11.400 --> 0:05:13.680 that their sons were being trained for the race war 0:05:13.680 --> 0:05:17.440 and a clan compound. So we're not going to get 0:05:17.440 --> 0:05:20.400 the whole picture of Lewis Beam today, but I will 0:05:20.440 --> 0:05:23.360 at least orient us a little bit before we get 0:05:23.400 --> 0:05:30.880 into the kid's garrotting lessons. Okay, first of all, I 0:05:30.920 --> 0:05:34.640 have to start with a confession. I have just now 0:05:34.680 --> 0:05:38.640 discovered that I've been saying this man's name wrong for 0:05:38.680 --> 0:05:43.200 a decade and nobody ever said anything to me. I 0:05:43.200 --> 0:05:45.520 had to take a lap around the apartment, sighing and 0:05:45.600 --> 0:05:54.600 groaning and slamming cabinets. Are you kidding me? Louis Louis Beam, 0:05:55.480 --> 0:05:58.800 l o U I s that could be Lewis or Louis. 0:05:59.440 --> 0:06:03.960 You know, say Louis King, Louis Louis Armstrong. I don't know. 0:06:04.040 --> 0:06:08.960 It could go either way, and I've always said Louis Beam, 0:06:09.160 --> 0:06:12.279 And now that I'm stressing out about it, I don't 0:06:12.320 --> 0:06:15.240 know why did I hear someone say that? Or did 0:06:15.279 --> 0:06:19.680 I just make it up and never check. His name 0:06:19.760 --> 0:06:26.640 is Louis ray Beam Junior l o UIs, but his 0:06:26.680 --> 0:06:31.480 father is Louis Raybeams Senior l e Wis. He's named 0:06:31.480 --> 0:06:33.799 after a guy whose name isn't even spelled the same 0:06:34.720 --> 0:06:37.719 if they called him junior, so you gotta figure they 0:06:37.800 --> 0:06:42.040 called the kid Lewis. I didn't want to believe it. 0:06:43.640 --> 0:06:48.719 I hate to be wrong. I'm so embarrassed. Lewis Texas 0:06:48.760 --> 0:06:53.160 Klansman Louis Beam. Everybody knew this, but me. I don't 0:06:53.200 --> 0:06:55.920 want to say it that way, but I'll be damned. 0:06:56.560 --> 0:06:59.880 It turns out there are actually a lot of recordings 0:07:00.480 --> 0:07:06.080 of this man saying his own name. As someone once 0:07:06.160 --> 0:07:14.240 told me, Louis, your reputation precedes you. I'm not kidding. 0:07:15.240 --> 0:07:17.480 I didn't have to look very hard to hear him 0:07:17.520 --> 0:07:21.760 saying his own name. And I've had this problem before, 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:25.120 and it is usually very hard to find a recording 0:07:25.120 --> 0:07:29.400 of someone saying their own name. So I'll just call 0:07:29.520 --> 0:07:32.680 Louis Thames name because I take you can't stand the 0:07:32.760 --> 0:07:34.600 hate and get out of the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen. 0:07:36.840 --> 0:07:39.240 For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, 0:07:39.280 --> 0:07:47.800 my name's Louis. Bam. Okay, okay, I get it, I 0:07:47.800 --> 0:07:52.000 get it. You got me, Louis. This has shaken me 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:55.440 to my core. I'm tempted to just keep saying Louis. 0:07:55.480 --> 0:07:59.320 You know sunk cost at this point, But apparently I'm 0:07:59.720 --> 0:08:03.520 just the only one. I was so desperate to prove 0:08:03.640 --> 0:08:07.320 that maybe people say it both ways that I found 0:08:08.200 --> 0:08:12.600 dozens of recordings of people saying his name over the decades. 0:08:13.120 --> 0:08:17.160 The man himself, his friends, and colleagues, news anchors, an 0:08:17.160 --> 0:08:23.800 episode of PBS Frontline Professors everybody says Louis. But if 0:08:23.800 --> 0:08:31.040 you google Louis, beam pronounce, the AI overview says Louis 0:08:32.160 --> 0:08:36.960 quote pronounced exactly like the name Louis or the French Louis, 0:08:37.559 --> 0:08:42.680 with the s remaining completely silent. Now, normally I would 0:08:42.760 --> 0:08:45.720 not admit to even having allowed my eyeballs to pass 0:08:45.800 --> 0:08:48.880 over the AI overview. I need to figure outw to 0:08:48.920 --> 0:08:51.240 turn it off because it is not a useful resource. 0:08:52.480 --> 0:08:55.160 But in this case, I was curious what the citation 0:08:55.320 --> 0:08:58.199 for this is, because there's always a citation. It doesn't 0:08:58.280 --> 0:09:01.040 mean the information it's pulling is correct or that it 0:09:01.080 --> 0:09:04.840 has correctly digested it. But it got this from somewhere. 0:09:05.920 --> 0:09:08.720 And the citation for this is an essay by doctor 0:09:08.800 --> 0:09:12.720 Lawrence Min Bui Davis, the former curator for the Smithsonian 0:09:12.760 --> 0:09:18.520 Asian Pacific American Center. According to doctor Davis, the Vietnamese 0:09:18.559 --> 0:09:23.880 population in South Texas did call him Louis Bim, and 0:09:24.320 --> 0:09:30.160 apparently bimb is a sort of vulgar Vietnamese slang term 0:09:30.280 --> 0:09:34.400 for vagina. So a bunch of old Vietnamese guys were 0:09:34.440 --> 0:09:37.520 sitting on their fishing boats in the bay talking about 0:09:37.559 --> 0:09:43.960 their enemy Louis pussy. What a fun piece of cultural history. 0:09:44.960 --> 0:09:48.840 Still never trust the AI overview. I got to figure 0:09:48.840 --> 0:09:50.679 out how to turn that thing off, because even if 0:09:50.679 --> 0:09:52.960 you're not trying to use it, it's just there at 0:09:52.960 --> 0:09:56.640 the top of the page making stuff up. In this case, 0:09:56.720 --> 0:09:59.320 it was telling me something that had an element of 0:09:59.360 --> 0:10:02.040 truth to it, and that is a cool story. But 0:10:02.080 --> 0:10:07.320 by presenting that as the proper pronunciation, no explanation, it 0:10:07.360 --> 0:10:11.400 erased an extremely specific context, and it was effectively telling 0:10:11.440 --> 0:10:16.079 me something that is not true. Remember AI does not 0:10:16.960 --> 0:10:22.000 know anything. AI doesn't do your research for you. But 0:10:22.000 --> 0:10:25.720 I'm sure you knew that. So I wasn't completely alone 0:10:25.920 --> 0:10:29.160 in calling him Louis. But I don't have a Vietnamese accent, 0:10:29.240 --> 0:10:31.840 so I guess I have to start calling him Lewis. 0:10:33.360 --> 0:10:36.160 I could have kept this whole embarrassing digression to myself, 0:10:36.200 --> 0:10:39.080 but I think we have the kind of relationship that 0:10:39.120 --> 0:10:43.520 prioritizes honesty, and I wanted to tell you the pussy thing. 0:10:48.480 --> 0:10:51.600 The second earth shattering revelation I had while I was 0:10:51.640 --> 0:10:55.960 researching this week came when I found out he's still alive. 0:10:57.840 --> 0:11:01.600 I genuinely had no idea Lewis being was still. I 0:11:01.600 --> 0:11:05.200 don't know why, but I assumed he'd been dead for years, 0:11:05.240 --> 0:11:10.200 like twenty years maybe. I guess they'd mostly think of 0:11:10.280 --> 0:11:13.840 him as being in his prime in the seventies and eighties, 0:11:13.840 --> 0:11:15.560 and that was so long ago, you know. He was 0:11:15.600 --> 0:11:18.520 a key figure in that time period, sort of on 0:11:18.559 --> 0:11:21.720 the level with guys like William Luther Pierce. And Pierce 0:11:21.760 --> 0:11:25.080 did die twenty five years ago, but he was significantly 0:11:25.160 --> 0:11:30.720 older than Beam was. Lewis Beam is, as it turns out, 0:11:31.080 --> 0:11:34.680 the exact same age as the President, So he'll be 0:11:34.679 --> 0:11:38.720 turning eighty this summer. He dropped out of the public 0:11:38.760 --> 0:11:41.600 eye three full decades ago, so I'm sure I wasn't 0:11:41.640 --> 0:11:45.320 the only one who assumed he was dead. His last 0:11:45.320 --> 0:11:48.600 public appearance was in nineteen ninety six, around the time 0:11:48.640 --> 0:11:51.000 he announced that he was retiring after thirty years in 0:11:51.040 --> 0:11:53.760 the movement so he could spend more time with his family. 0:11:55.120 --> 0:11:58.560 He also blamed his withdrawal on his declining health, which 0:11:58.559 --> 0:12:01.440 he claimed was due to exposure to agent orange during 0:12:01.440 --> 0:12:05.280 his service in the Vietnam War. I can't tell you 0:12:05.360 --> 0:12:08.240 if the aging Klansman really was sick from exposure to 0:12:08.280 --> 0:12:12.040 the chemical Defolian that the US military sprayed all over Vietnam, 0:12:12.559 --> 0:12:14.200 but if he just wanted to spend more time with 0:12:14.240 --> 0:12:17.400 his family, he picked a bad time to do it. 0:12:18.720 --> 0:12:21.160 A few months after he stepped back from public life 0:12:21.160 --> 0:12:25.160 to devote himself to his family, he didn't have one anymore. 0:12:26.880 --> 0:12:30.840 His fourth wife, Sheila, the one who'd shot that Mexican 0:12:30.880 --> 0:12:34.120 police officer for him a decade earlier, filed for divorce 0:12:34.160 --> 0:12:37.760 in nineteen ninety seven, and the judge granted him very 0:12:37.840 --> 0:12:43.199 limited access to the couple's two young daughters. His oldest daughter, 0:12:43.600 --> 0:12:45.680 the one who'd been caught in that shootout in Mexico, 0:12:46.320 --> 0:12:49.480 was returned to her mother, Beams third wife, Kara, in 0:12:49.559 --> 0:12:52.800 nineteen eighty seven, after Mexican authority sent the girl home 0:12:52.840 --> 0:12:57.040 to the US. Her father had abducted her during a 0:12:57.080 --> 0:12:59.720 custodial disagreement in nineteen eighty two when she was a 0:12:59.720 --> 0:13:03.160 top That may have played a role in the judge's 0:13:03.200 --> 0:13:05.719 decision to give Sheila primary custody of the girls in 0:13:05.760 --> 0:13:11.920 her divorce. The man had a history, but I guess 0:13:11.920 --> 0:13:15.200 I should have started by telling you what that history was. 0:13:17.080 --> 0:13:20.160 He's come up in passing here and there. It's hard 0:13:20.160 --> 0:13:22.520 to avoid him, really, if you're talking about the American 0:13:22.559 --> 0:13:26.960 far right in the seventies and eighties. He was a klansman. 0:13:28.400 --> 0:13:31.400 Not just any clansman. He was kind of a big deal. 0:13:33.040 --> 0:13:36.240 He was the architect of the leaderless resistance model of 0:13:36.320 --> 0:13:40.120 right wing violence in the United States, that cell based 0:13:40.160 --> 0:13:43.680 structure for terrorist attacks that makes the movement harder to 0:13:43.760 --> 0:13:50.000 track and harder to stop. This week I returned once 0:13:50.040 --> 0:13:53.240 again to one of my favorite books, Kathleen BLUs Bring 0:13:53.280 --> 0:13:56.160 the War Home. I know I've said it before, but 0:13:56.200 --> 0:13:59.199 it's worth saying again. If you haven't, go ahead and 0:13:59.200 --> 0:14:01.640 pick up a copy. It really is one of the 0:14:01.640 --> 0:14:03.920 best books out there on the white power movement in 0:14:03.920 --> 0:14:07.400 the United States. And not to beat a dead horse, 0:14:07.720 --> 0:14:11.440 but I did find audio of Kathleen saying his name. 0:14:12.800 --> 0:14:17.400 She says Louis, because that's his name. Honestly, I trust 0:14:17.440 --> 0:14:20.560 her more than I trust the man himself, so I 0:14:20.600 --> 0:14:27.320 give up. Nobody says Louis. Her book isn't exactly a 0:14:27.360 --> 0:14:31.040 biography of Louis Beam, but the modern militant far right 0:14:31.080 --> 0:14:35.040 in America doesn't really exist without him, so it's as 0:14:35.080 --> 0:14:39.000 close to one as you're going to find. The title itself, 0:14:39.600 --> 0:14:42.440 bring the War Home, is a reference to one of 0:14:42.440 --> 0:14:47.000 Beam's essays in his nineteen eighty three collection Essays of 0:14:47.040 --> 0:14:52.800 a Klansman. One of the essays is called Vietnam, Bring 0:14:52.840 --> 0:14:58.760 It On Home. Beam was a Vietnam War veteran, and 0:14:58.880 --> 0:15:02.400 he wasn't done fighting when he got home. He'd fought 0:15:02.440 --> 0:15:05.760 for the US government in Vietnam, and now he wanted 0:15:05.800 --> 0:15:15.200 to wage war against the US government. Lewis Raybeaham Junior 0:15:15.480 --> 0:15:19.479 was born on August twentieth, nineteen forty six, in Lufkin, Texas. 0:15:20.240 --> 0:15:22.520 And I know I said I was done, meaning a 0:15:22.520 --> 0:15:25.160 dead horse. But according to the Texas Department of Health 0:15:25.200 --> 0:15:29.040 Bureau of Vital Statistics, the name on his birth certificate, 0:15:29.080 --> 0:15:31.440 the name that was recorded with the State of Texas 0:15:31.440 --> 0:15:34.560 at the time of his birth is Lewis with a W, 0:15:35.520 --> 0:15:37.760 just like his father's. So I don't know when he 0:15:37.800 --> 0:15:40.000 started spelling his own name wrong. But okay, I'm done. 0:15:40.040 --> 0:15:44.840 I'm done. He was the eldest of four children born 0:15:44.880 --> 0:15:50.080 to Madeleine and Louis Beam Senior. Most sources just skip 0:15:50.120 --> 0:15:52.600 over his childhood and pick up with his enlistment in 0:15:52.600 --> 0:15:56.240 the army in nineteen sixty five. The Southern Poverty Law 0:15:56.280 --> 0:16:00.200 Center is biographical sketch even says that there isn't much 0:16:00.240 --> 0:16:05.160 known about beams childhood. Obviously, the couple of hours I 0:16:05.200 --> 0:16:07.360 spent poking around on my computer here in my home 0:16:07.440 --> 0:16:11.200 office wasn't going to dig up some previously unknown primary 0:16:11.240 --> 0:16:14.160 source that the experts missed all these years. So I 0:16:14.200 --> 0:16:16.560 don't have a bombshell for you. I don't have any 0:16:16.600 --> 0:16:21.600 new information about his childhood, but I did find kind 0:16:21.640 --> 0:16:27.440 of a fun fact about his conception. Lewis Senior was 0:16:27.480 --> 0:16:31.000 a soldier to He was in the Army. He was 0:16:31.040 --> 0:16:34.960 deployed in nineteen forty three, serving in Algeria, France, and Italy. 0:16:36.320 --> 0:16:38.200 He was injured several times over the course of the 0:16:38.200 --> 0:16:40.720 war and received a bronze star at a purple heart. 0:16:41.960 --> 0:16:44.760 He attended Officer candidate school in France during the war, 0:16:45.600 --> 0:16:49.240 and by nineteen forty five he was a lieutenant and 0:16:49.280 --> 0:16:52.200 in the summer of nineteen forty five he received a 0:16:52.240 --> 0:16:58.680 new assignment. He was a prison guard at Nuremberg. The 0:16:58.800 --> 0:17:02.720 Klansman's father was one of the soldiers standing guard over 0:17:02.760 --> 0:17:10.600 the Nazi war criminals. He met Hermann Gurring in November 0:17:10.640 --> 0:17:13.840 of nineteen forty five, after thirty three months deployed in 0:17:13.880 --> 0:17:17.480 the European theater, Lewis Senior was granted a six week 0:17:17.520 --> 0:17:20.920 furlough to travel home to Texas to see his wife. 0:17:21.080 --> 0:17:24.160 He'd married Madeline in nineteen forty one before he left 0:17:24.200 --> 0:17:27.560 Texas for the army, but he'd barely seen her since. 0:17:29.080 --> 0:17:31.879 The Tyler Morning Telegraph ran a story about his visit home, 0:17:32.320 --> 0:17:35.280 describing what he'd been up to for the last three years. 0:17:36.119 --> 0:17:40.960 The headline was gurring looks, beaten, morose, avoids meeting eyes 0:17:41.000 --> 0:17:46.399 of others, reports jail guard from East Texas. Based on 0:17:46.480 --> 0:17:49.840 Lewis Junior's state of birth, he would have been conceived 0:17:49.880 --> 0:17:54.160 about halfway through his father's visit home. So maybe some 0:17:54.240 --> 0:17:57.960 residual Nazi vibes from Nuremberg had transferred directly into him 0:17:58.040 --> 0:18:02.879 at conception or something. I don't know. Those old local 0:18:02.920 --> 0:18:06.720 newspapers had one more curious tidbit about Louis's childhood that 0:18:06.800 --> 0:18:10.399 I hadn't found anywhere else. When he was a junior 0:18:10.440 --> 0:18:29.000 in high school, his mother shot his father during an 0:18:29.080 --> 0:18:32.119 argument one evening at home. She shot him once in 0:18:32.119 --> 0:18:35.080 the stomach with a German made twenty two caliber pistol. 0:18:36.600 --> 0:18:38.959 She was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. 0:18:40.560 --> 0:18:46.200 He survived, but the marriage didn't. The divorce was finalized 0:18:46.200 --> 0:18:50.400 the week of Louis's eighteenth birthday. His three younger siblings 0:18:50.440 --> 0:18:53.720 were sent to live with their uncle. It doesn't say 0:18:53.720 --> 0:18:58.880 what happened to Louis. Madeline Beam ended up being tried twice, 0:19:00.119 --> 0:19:03.440 time ended in a mistrial, but she was ultimately acquitted. 0:19:03.720 --> 0:19:06.640 In March of nineteen sixty five, a full year after 0:19:06.640 --> 0:19:12.800 the incident, Lewis seemed to be struggling his senior year 0:19:12.840 --> 0:19:16.439 of high school. A few months after his mother shot 0:19:16.440 --> 0:19:19.399 his father, Lewis Junior was arrested on a charge of 0:19:19.440 --> 0:19:23.879 criminal mischief in some unspecified incident involving throwing a bottle 0:19:23.920 --> 0:19:28.040 at a house. A few months later, right around the 0:19:28.080 --> 0:19:30.440 time of his mother's second trial for shooting his father, 0:19:31.320 --> 0:19:34.160 an eighteen year old Lewis got a sixteen year old 0:19:34.160 --> 0:19:38.639 girl pregnant. They married shortly after he graduated high school. 0:19:40.640 --> 0:19:44.200 Marilyn Milligan was the first of Lewis Beam's five wives, 0:19:45.160 --> 0:19:48.240 and the first of three women who would be sixteen 0:19:48.320 --> 0:19:51.600 years old at the time of their marriage to Beam. 0:19:52.520 --> 0:19:57.800 He was eighteen the first time, but he kept getting older, 0:19:58.760 --> 0:20:04.399 and the wives stage sixteen before his first child was 0:20:04.440 --> 0:20:08.800 even born, Louis Bean was off to the army. Maybe 0:20:08.840 --> 0:20:12.280 he felt like he didn't have other options. His parents 0:20:12.320 --> 0:20:14.720 were kind of dealing with their own stuff. It's not 0:20:14.760 --> 0:20:16.720 even clear where he'd been living when he got his 0:20:16.760 --> 0:20:21.080 teenage girlfriend pregnant. So he enlisted in the army in 0:20:21.119 --> 0:20:26.080 September of nineteen sixty five. He just turned nineteen and 0:20:26.119 --> 0:20:28.040 he had a teenage wife with a baby on the way. 0:20:29.880 --> 0:20:32.760 He was sent to a base in Germany first, but 0:20:32.840 --> 0:20:34.960 from the spring of nineteen sixty seven to the fall 0:20:35.000 --> 0:20:39.480 of nineteen sixty eight he spent eighteen months in country. 0:20:41.119 --> 0:20:43.320 He served as a machine gunner on a helicopter with 0:20:43.359 --> 0:20:48.280 the twenty fifth Aviation Battalion. By his own account, he 0:20:48.359 --> 0:20:52.439 quickly grew to enjoy the killing. He was good at it, 0:20:53.480 --> 0:20:56.640 and his country thanked him for it. He came home 0:20:56.680 --> 0:21:00.520 a highly decorated veteran, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross, an 0:21:00.600 --> 0:21:04.959 Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal for Heroism. He 0:21:05.000 --> 0:21:07.440 claims to have killed fifty people during his year and 0:21:07.480 --> 0:21:10.719 a half in Vietnam. All it did was give him 0:21:10.720 --> 0:21:15.720 PTSD a taste for killing communists and the best training 0:21:15.880 --> 0:21:23.040 a future paramilitary commander. Could ever hope for. Not to 0:21:23.080 --> 0:21:27.760 be clear, he was already racist. Getting a free pass 0:21:27.800 --> 0:21:31.720 from the US government to shoot Vietnamese people didn't implant 0:21:32.080 --> 0:21:36.000 the notion of white supremacy in his head. A now 0:21:36.040 --> 0:21:39.240 deleted website maintained by veterans of the twenty fifth Aviation 0:21:39.320 --> 0:21:43.160 Battalion shows a photo of a young Lewis Beam posing 0:21:43.160 --> 0:21:46.720 in his quarters. He's posing in front of a big 0:21:46.760 --> 0:21:50.320 Confederate flag hanging on the wall in a little thatched hut, 0:21:51.280 --> 0:21:54.520 and the caption reads, all I gotta say is vote 0:21:54.560 --> 0:21:59.680 for Wallace. He was apparently well known for talking about 0:21:59.680 --> 0:22:03.440 how much she liked George Wallace, the segregationist running for 0:22:03.560 --> 0:22:08.399 president in nineteen sixty eight. According to his Essays of 0:22:08.440 --> 0:22:12.240 a Klansman, he joined the Klan shortly after returning home 0:22:12.280 --> 0:22:16.400 in nineteen sixty eight. Maybe he joined in sixty nine. 0:22:17.440 --> 0:22:23.360 Certainly by nineteen seventy he was allegedly already carrying out 0:22:23.440 --> 0:22:28.200 bombings for the Klan by the beginning of nineteen seventy. 0:22:28.240 --> 0:22:32.080 His own timelines are a little scattered. In Essays of 0:22:32.080 --> 0:22:34.959 a Klansman, he says he joined the Klan after watching 0:22:34.960 --> 0:22:39.000 footage of an anti war demonstration on TV. He was 0:22:39.000 --> 0:22:42.120 sitting at home in Texas, just freshly home from the war, 0:22:43.520 --> 0:22:47.960 and he watched people that he calls pro Vietcong communist 0:22:48.080 --> 0:22:53.720 sympathizers picketing outside the Capitol Building in DC, and those 0:22:53.760 --> 0:22:58.280 demonstrators set an American flag on fire and spat on 0:22:58.359 --> 0:23:03.320 its ashes. Now, it's unclear if the demonstrators in question 0:23:03.400 --> 0:23:07.280 were actually Communists or if this is just another instance 0:23:07.320 --> 0:23:10.520 of a reactionary labeling all of his enemies communists. That 0:23:10.680 --> 0:23:15.640 is something he specifically did a lot, and I'm not 0:23:15.840 --> 0:23:18.439 able to tell you with any kind of certainty what 0:23:18.640 --> 0:23:21.480 day this would have occurred on. There were a lot 0:23:21.520 --> 0:23:24.400 of demonstrations against the war, and a lot of them 0:23:24.400 --> 0:23:27.879 featured flag burning. So this may have been a real 0:23:28.200 --> 0:23:32.080 specific incident, or it may not have, but it represented 0:23:32.119 --> 0:23:35.960 something that he certainly could have seen on TV. He 0:23:36.040 --> 0:23:38.920 describes this incident as taking place in the late fall 0:23:39.359 --> 0:23:44.160 quote one hundred and seven years after Fort Sumter, referring 0:23:44.240 --> 0:23:46.280 to the battle that started the Civil War in eighteen 0:23:46.359 --> 0:23:51.520 sixty one. So he doesn't say when this happened, but 0:23:51.640 --> 0:23:53.600 it sounds like he's saying he joined the Klan in 0:23:53.640 --> 0:23:57.360 the fall of nineteen sixty eight. Although in other writings 0:23:57.400 --> 0:24:00.600 he describes having joined the movement in April of nineteen 0:24:00.640 --> 0:24:08.200 sixty nine, but around then, in March of nineteen seventy, 0:24:08.359 --> 0:24:10.800 he was briefly detained after snatching a flag from a 0:24:10.840 --> 0:24:14.040 left wing demonstrator at a rally against the draft in Houston. 0:24:15.320 --> 0:24:17.960 He attacked a member of Students for a Democratic Society 0:24:18.600 --> 0:24:21.400 and had to be protected by marchers from the Peace Coalition, 0:24:21.680 --> 0:24:26.240 who escorted him at his request through the crowd towards 0:24:26.240 --> 0:24:29.879 the police. At the edge of the rally. FBI agents 0:24:29.920 --> 0:24:33.080 who were there that day were seen photographing the faces 0:24:33.119 --> 0:24:36.000 and license plates of the marchers who were there to 0:24:36.000 --> 0:24:39.639 oppose the war in Vietnam, but the police released the 0:24:39.720 --> 0:24:45.080 violent clansmen without charges. According to an informant, he was 0:24:45.119 --> 0:24:47.879 one of the klansmen responsible for blowing up a radio 0:24:47.920 --> 0:24:52.560 station two months later. Later that year, in October of 0:24:52.640 --> 0:24:56.240 nineteen seventy, Beam was invited to a banquet hosted by 0:24:56.320 --> 0:25:01.359 Anna Chenault, widow of General Claire Schanalt. Anna Chenault was 0:25:01.359 --> 0:25:04.560 an influential fundraiser for Richard Nixon, and she gave a 0:25:04.600 --> 0:25:07.280 speech that evening about the importance of continuing the war 0:25:07.320 --> 0:25:11.280 in Vietnam, and she presented Louis Beam with a Good 0:25:11.320 --> 0:25:15.560 Citizenship award for his efforts in attacking that peace protester, 0:25:17.480 --> 0:25:19.760 and just by wave a little bit of background on 0:25:19.800 --> 0:25:24.120 Anna Chenault. Two years before that banquet, she was involved 0:25:24.119 --> 0:25:28.479 in Richard Nixon's efforts to sabotage President Johnson's attempts at 0:25:28.480 --> 0:25:33.200 peace talks. Now, the actual impact of the Chenault affair 0:25:33.320 --> 0:25:35.520 on the length of the war is a matter of 0:25:35.560 --> 0:25:39.320 some debate, but it is a historical fact that she 0:25:39.440 --> 0:25:42.720 was working on Richard Nixon's behalf in an attempt to 0:25:42.760 --> 0:25:47.120 prolong the war intentionally, so I guess it does make 0:25:47.200 --> 0:25:49.680 some sense that she was giving out awards for roughing 0:25:49.720 --> 0:25:57.240 up hippies and peacenicks. Beam wasn't publicly identified as a 0:25:57.280 --> 0:26:00.639 clansman until he was arrested in nineteen seventy one for 0:26:00.680 --> 0:26:03.159 a series of bombings that had begun over a year earlier. 0:26:04.400 --> 0:26:06.760 He and more than a dozen other clansmen were indicted 0:26:06.760 --> 0:26:09.560 on a laundry list of charges, including bombing that radio 0:26:09.600 --> 0:26:13.399 station and the offices of the Houston area Socialist Workers 0:26:13.480 --> 0:26:16.880 Party that was a popular target for the time period. 0:26:17.160 --> 0:26:20.119 If you remember from the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes. That 0:26:20.240 --> 0:26:23.119 was one of his first bombings as well, and the 0:26:23.160 --> 0:26:26.200 Socialist Workers Party office in LA was blown up by 0:26:26.240 --> 0:26:29.400 members of the National Socialist White People's Party, all kind 0:26:29.440 --> 0:26:31.520 of around this same time period. It was something these 0:26:31.560 --> 0:26:34.879 guys thought about a lot. And in the case of 0:26:34.880 --> 0:26:38.560 the bombing in Houston, the defense attorney on that case 0:26:39.640 --> 0:26:42.400 is someone you might remember from a lot of other 0:26:42.520 --> 0:26:47.960 stories about unsolved bombings during this time period. Representing one 0:26:47.960 --> 0:26:52.240 of beams co conspirators was National States Rights Party chairman 0:26:52.320 --> 0:26:58.320 and serial bomber JB. Stoner. That doesn't go anywhere, but 0:26:58.840 --> 0:27:02.280 that's a recurring character, So put a pin on the board, 0:27:03.200 --> 0:27:10.200 and oddly this case disappears. In nineteen seventy one, Lewis 0:27:10.240 --> 0:27:14.280 Beam is arrested and indicted for a number of bombings. 0:27:14.440 --> 0:27:19.960 There's credible evidence, there are informants. One guy got convicted, 0:27:20.920 --> 0:27:24.760 but the case against him just kind of never I 0:27:24.760 --> 0:27:27.000 don't know, there's just nothing, like, there's no record I 0:27:27.000 --> 0:27:29.040 can find that it went to trial, or that it 0:27:29.119 --> 0:27:32.080 was dropped, or that a particular reason was given for anything. 0:27:32.160 --> 0:27:34.800 It just disappears from the news. It's in the news 0:27:34.840 --> 0:27:37.240 all the time throughout nineteen seventy one. I mean, Beam 0:27:37.320 --> 0:27:41.600 is testifying for the defense several times and proceedings against 0:27:41.600 --> 0:27:45.719