Speaker 1: I've started going door to door trying to find out
Speaker 1: something about the most famous writer of this area, man
Speaker 1: named Asa Carter Rolle under the pen name of Forest Carter.
Speaker 1: She said, get out of here and don't come back.
Speaker 2: This is part two of our con Man series on
Speaker 2: the double life of as of Forrest Carter. We're diving
Speaker 2: into the gritty details of the violence, hate, and conspiracy
Speaker 2: philosophies that theme the first forty five years of his
Speaker 2: life and how in the last decade of his life
Speaker 2: he transformed into an unrecognizable Cherokee Indian author who wanted
Speaker 2: to be America's next heming Way and he almost did
Speaker 2: it once again. Author of Unmasking the Klansman, doctor Dan T. Carter,
Speaker 2: and Steve Runella of Meat Eater lead the way, as
Speaker 2: my guests, brace yourself because our windy trail will be treacherous.
Speaker 2: As we'll talk about the beating of jazz singer Nat
Speaker 2: King Cole read from the Unibomber's manifesto, and we'll begin
Speaker 2: to understand how Asa Carter did what he did. We're
Speaker 2: going neck deep into the mind of a con man
Speaker 2: for real.
Speaker 3: I don't think you're gonna want to miss this.
Speaker 4: One.
Speaker 5: If you were shooting for race to instill racial hatred,
Speaker 5: you missed the mark. If you're shooting to make you
Speaker 5: love for your grandparents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my name is Klay Nukem, and this is the
Speaker 2: Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant,
Speaker 2: search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell
Speaker 2: the story of Americans who live their lives close to
Speaker 2: the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built
Speaker 2: hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as good
Speaker 2: as the places we explored.
Speaker 1: While I was in the middle of doing my research
Speaker 1: on the Wallace biography George Wallace, I watched the educational
Speaker 1: Little Tree Climb. From being a university press book with
Speaker 1: five thousand printing of five thousand books, suddenly it was
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, and it was on
Speaker 1: the New York Times bestseller list. And as I considered it,
Speaker 1: I was probably more indignant than I should have been.
Speaker 1: I thought, this is the guy, this is a lie.
Speaker 1: And I read the book. I thought, there's nothing wrong
Speaker 1: with the book, but there is something wrong with claiming
Speaker 1: to be some Native American, having an Indian ancestry and
Speaker 1: using it to sell your book. So I contacted the
Speaker 1: New York Times, and actually when I first contacted they
Speaker 1: didn't believe me. They said, no, he has a long
Speaker 1: record as a novelist. So I sent him a statement
Speaker 1: from the ambulance driver who he died in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine in Abilene after a biblical death that I described
Speaker 1: in the book, and he was shipped out of Abilene
Speaker 1: by air as Forrest Carter and the herse driver I
Speaker 1: talked to, who said, all I know is when he
Speaker 1: arrived he was Forrest Carter, and when I buried him,
Speaker 1: he was Acer Carter.
Speaker 3: That was doctor Dan T. Carter.
Speaker 2: He's no relation to Asa. And on episode one of
Speaker 2: our Cotton Man series, we dove deep into the contents
Speaker 2: of a book published in nineteen seventy six called The
Speaker 2: Education of Little Tree, written by a man who claimed
Speaker 2: he was a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter, and his
Speaker 2: book was semi autobiographical. It's brilliant prose about an orphan
Speaker 2: Native America boy raised by his grandparents while being taught
Speaker 2: moral lessons about life through their connection to the land
Speaker 2: and the people in their community.
Speaker 3: It gives poignant insight.
Speaker 2: Into empathy, love, and integrity towards all shades of people
Speaker 2: except politicians, the government, and anything organized and institutionalized by man,
Speaker 2: which all these things are inherently corrupt. This all sounds
Speaker 2: pretty reasonable. Moonshine and deer hunting, fox hunting with hounds,
Speaker 2: predator prey relationships, turkey trapping mules, whooper will lore, and
Speaker 2: how to tell when a watermelon is ripe is all in.
Speaker 3: The book too.
Speaker 2: It teems with the rich mountain culture of the Great
Speaker 2: Depression era impoverished Southern Appalachia. However, there's a catch that
Speaker 2: was relatively unknown until nineteen ninety one when a New
Speaker 2: York Times article by doctor Dan T. Carter, who we
Speaker 2: just talked to expose the author as a Carter. And
Speaker 2: he wasn't a Cherokee Indian, but he was an ardent
Speaker 2: white supremacist, considered radical even by others in the movement.
Speaker 2: He was a leader in the klu Klux Klan, under
Speaker 2: constant surveillance from the FBI. He was involved in several
Speaker 2: acts of violence, and he was a speech writer for
Speaker 2: Alabama Governor George Wallace Asa. Carter was a con man.
Speaker 2: He was a professional white supremacist, dedicated to his craft.
Speaker 2: He was a wordsmith, an orator, an actor. He had
Speaker 2: an IQ of one hundred and thirty eight, and some
Speaker 2: considered him a media and marketing genius.
Speaker 6: And I say segregation now, segregation to Mara, and segregation forever.
Speaker 2: Those famous words spoken by George Wallace were written by
Speaker 2: Asa Carter. Today there is a one thousand page FBI
Speaker 2: folder holding all all the surveillance done on Asa. He
Speaker 2: was suspicioned to be a dangerous man? Is that why
Speaker 2: he had to change his identity? But the latter part
Speaker 2: of his life, his writing, did that evidence a changed man.
Speaker 2: We're contrasting the two external data points we have on
Speaker 2: his life. Number one a brilliant book of empathy to
Speaker 2: Native Americans and number two, a professional life dedicated to
Speaker 2: racial supremacy. Racism is typically rooted in a desire to
Speaker 2: preserve one's culture at the detriment of another. It's the
Speaker 2: manifestation of a fear and insecurity. But it's also misguided
Speaker 2: love of one's own culture. But loving your culture isn't
Speaker 2: necessarily a bad thing. I'd say most people of the
Speaker 2: world appreciate their culture. But if we're trying to really
Speaker 2: understand who Asa Carter was. I think we've got to
Speaker 2: see and acknowledge the mechanics at play. In Ace's case,
Speaker 2: he was very interested in preserving the Anglo Saxon South,
Speaker 2: which he believed had been taken advantage of in the
Speaker 2: post Civil War reconstruction, which isn't an outlandish statement. However,
Speaker 2: the philosophy of his hate preyed on people's bitterness, weakness,
Speaker 2: and fear. The rudimentary, carnal, corrupt ideology produced nothing but
Speaker 2: more brokenness. What makes crazy men so dangerous is how
Speaker 2: close they are to being incredibly normal. I'd also like
Speaker 2: to say that I'm not telling this story to demonize
Speaker 2: the South, nor suggests that we're a bunch of racists
Speaker 2: down here.
Speaker 3: On the contrary, this.
Speaker 2: Story is so extreme it stands out like a strutton
Speaker 2: gobbler in a wheat field. To say that the South
Speaker 2: hasn't massively moved forward in racial reconciliation since the Jim
Speaker 2: Crow days would be inaccurate, And it would be as
Speaker 2: inaccurate to say that Rayism doesn't exist here in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three. And I think stories like this are important
Speaker 2: to talk about. I think it helps us understand where
Speaker 2: some of this stuff comes from and how to fix it.
Speaker 2: It's important to remember that Asa Carter died at the
Speaker 2: age of fifty four in nineteen seventy nine, the year
Speaker 2: I was born, So we're just guessing about his motivations.
Speaker 2: Here's doctor Dan T. Carter, who I'm gonna call Dan
Speaker 2: to keep things simple on this podcast, who is now
Speaker 2: eighty one years old and sharp as attack. He's going
Speaker 2: to tell us about his on the ground research on
Speaker 2: Asa in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Well, the summer nineteen ninety one, when the posthumous book
Speaker 1: Education Little Tree became so popular, I thought I gotta
Speaker 1: fine something about this guy. So I had been in
Speaker 1: Alabama doing a lot of research, and I drove up
Speaker 1: to Aniston, went to the local library. They were very helpful,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't exact actually find out where he lived.
Speaker 1: I knew the area, Darmanville. It was called a rural area,
Speaker 1: so I drove out there. My life was with me
Speaker 1: and and I think, I'm I could be a con man.
Speaker 1: I guess uh. I was never dishonest with anybody, but
Speaker 1: I would always say I'd go up to doors or busy.
Speaker 1: I went to several small businesses there and said I'm
Speaker 1: trying to find out something about the most famous writer
Speaker 1: of the area, man named Asa Carter Rolle under the
Speaker 1: pen name of Forest Carter. Uh, and uh, everybody either
Speaker 1: cleaned they didn't know anything. But then I started going
Speaker 1: door to door and.
Speaker 3: Uh, this is real journalism.
Speaker 1: And some fair number of people didn't you know. They
Speaker 1: were younger, they didn't know, but it was older people
Speaker 1: without accept I started to say almost but without exception,
Speaker 1: they either became hostile or they wouldn't talk to me.
Speaker 1: And years later, when I got the FBI files, I
Speaker 1: found out why the local community resented the fact that
Speaker 1: when he was active as a right wing radio announcer
Speaker 1: and everything lived there, he was under constant suspicion by
Speaker 1: the FBI. They were constantly monitoring, They follow him, they
Speaker 1: park at the end of his driveway. And this is
Speaker 1: the middle of the Civil rights movement. These people didn't
Speaker 1: like government people anyway, and they saw this kind of
Speaker 1: persecution of their hometown.
Speaker 3: Boy.
Speaker 1: So I finally found a small engine shop and I
Speaker 1: talked to the guy. He said, I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about him, what he did. He just didn't want to
Speaker 1: talk to me. And as I left, one of the
Speaker 1: mechanics older guy walked out behind and he motioned me
Speaker 1: over and I went over and he said, well listen.
Speaker 1: He said, I wasn't one of Asi's boys, he said
Speaker 1: boys part of his clan group. But he said, I
Speaker 1: know a boy he said, who's real good friends with
Speaker 1: ASA's son, Asa Jr. And I said, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: how to find his house. So I drove up there,
Speaker 1: went inside, talked to his wife first, and she got
Speaker 1: her husband. She was cheerful in everything, and he came
Speaker 1: down and I explained what I wanted in didn't sale word.
Speaker 1: He went back upstairs. I could hear him on the phone,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't hear what he was saying, and his
Speaker 1: wife was kind of embarrassed. She said, I don't know
Speaker 1: what's going So she walked up the stairs to the
Speaker 1: top of the stairs for a minute. She came running
Speaker 1: down the stairs. She said, get out of here right now,
Speaker 1: and I said, what do you mean. She said, get
Speaker 1: out of here and don't come back. And I don't
Speaker 1: know what he was promising to do, but it clearly
Speaker 1: was not a good idea to stay there. So I
Speaker 1: left and he came running out on the porch just
Speaker 1: as I drove off.
Speaker 2: He was hot. Dan would later receive some veiled threats
Speaker 2: of violence from others after or his New York Times
Speaker 2: story broke neighbors standing up for the reputation of neighbors
Speaker 2: is conceivable, but so was violence in the stratosphere of
Speaker 2: as of Carter's. On April tenth, nineteen fifty six, jazz
Speaker 2: singer Nat King Cole was attacked on stage in Birmingham, Alabama,
Speaker 2: and members of ass klu Klux Klan group did it well.
Speaker 6: They say that the reason I was man attack here
Speaker 6: was because of a feeling against rock and roll of
Speaker 6: music and Negro music so called.
Speaker 4: Now what do you feel about that?
Speaker 7: What I mean?
Speaker 6: If that was the case, then I'm the wrong guy.
Speaker 1: You're not rock and roll. I don't think so.
Speaker 4: I think if you heard me before, I'm sure you
Speaker 4: would ask me that.
Speaker 1: If you heard me before, what do you know what
Speaker 1: rock and roll is?
Speaker 2: That was Nat king Cole being interviewed about the attack.
Speaker 2: The Klan was very concerned about the racial crossover popularity
Speaker 2: of black musicians and the danger craze of rock and
Speaker 2: roll music. Six men were arrested for the attack, and
Speaker 2: ASA Carter would set up a legal defense fund for them,
Speaker 2: declaring them political prisoners. Asa was incredibly media savvy and
Speaker 2: knew how to turn a story. In a non related incident,
Speaker 2: Asa would be accused but acquitted of shooting two men
Speaker 2: with a forty four magnum at a clan meeting in
Speaker 2: downtown Birmingham. These men had accused him of stealing money
Speaker 2: and he shot him. Lots of people saw it happen,
Speaker 2: but nobody would talk against Asa, so they had no evidence.
Speaker 2: But it's widely believed that he did shoot these men.
Speaker 2: But let's get back to Dan being in Alabama in
Speaker 2: the early nineteen nineties trying to learn about Asa. I
Speaker 2: asked him how Asa could have pulled off this double
Speaker 2: life so well.
Speaker 1: It's partly the power of his skills. When he was
Speaker 1: in high school, I interviewed one of his high school
Speaker 1: friends and he was in a high school play. And
Speaker 1: this classmate of his said it was embarrassing, and I said,
Speaker 1: because he was bad. He said, no, is because the
Speaker 1: rest of these were high school kids and he was
Speaker 1: like a Hollywood actor. He was totally at ease.
Speaker 3: On the stage.
Speaker 1: His lines were delivered like a professional actor, and it.
Speaker 3: Made the whole made it awkward.
Speaker 1: To watch. You know, so from the very beginning he
Speaker 1: had these skills. When he decided after he got out
Speaker 1: of the Navy to go to the work to University
Speaker 1: of Colorado. He had done his naval training there during
Speaker 1: the war. He had graduated from high school, but it
Speaker 1: was a rural high school in Alabama, and the entrance
Speaker 1: person at the University of Colorado, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: about this, so would you mind taking IQ test? It
Speaker 1: was one hundred and thirty eight. So there was never
Speaker 1: any doubt about how really smart he was. He made
Speaker 1: a lot of political misjudgments, but in terms of intelligence,
Speaker 1: he was very capable and a great performer.
Speaker 3: He was like a Hollywood actor.
Speaker 2: Asa was gifted with words, with reading people and had
Speaker 2: instinctual insight into the way humans operated, what compelled them,
Speaker 2: what scared them, what moved them. Most dynamic leaders have
Speaker 2: this capability. He knew what people wanted to hear. Here's
Speaker 2: Dan with some of Ace's deep background.
Speaker 1: Asa Carter's had a background very much like mine. He
Speaker 1: grew up on a small farm in northeast Alabama, near Anniston,
Speaker 1: and there's no evidence at all during his high school
Speaker 1: years from his classmates that he was anything other than
Speaker 1: a typical white Southern boy. I mean, sure all of
Speaker 1: us of that generation, his generation even up to mine,
Speaker 1: were unconsciously racist, but there's nothing to indicate he was
Speaker 1: viril und about it at all or even obsessed about it.
Speaker 1: So there was nothing, you know, in his early childhood
Speaker 1: that indicated this. And then he had some traumatic event.
Speaker 1: He enlisted in the Navy in the officer training program
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty three, and he flucked out, not because
Speaker 1: he wasn't smart, but because he was. He went to
Speaker 1: a rural high school that just did not prepare him
Speaker 1: for the rigorous kind of program involving mathematics and other things.
Speaker 1: He just didn't have the background, and it really embittered him.
Speaker 1: And he was now eighteen, almost nineteen years old. He
Speaker 1: goes in the Navy. He becomes a radio operator, a
Speaker 1: very courageous one. He serves in combat. But while he's
Speaker 1: on a ship in the Pacific, he meets a small
Speaker 1: group of people who are studying a series of race acist,
Speaker 1: anti submitted anti black writers. Gerald L. K. Smith names
Speaker 1: that you might not be familiar with the day, but
Speaker 1: were really big in the nineteen thirties and forties. Many
Speaker 1: of them growing out of the fascist movement of the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, and they couldn't talk about during the war.
Speaker 1: Obviously we were all in the war against it, but
Speaker 1: secretly many of them really really supported Hitler and they
Speaker 1: were fine with the war against Japan. That was why
Speaker 1: Carter always said, I was glad to fight the Japs,
Speaker 1: but I didn't want to fight my Aaryan brothers. And
Speaker 1: he became obsessed with this during the time he was
Speaker 1: the Navy, and that was a turning point in his life.
Speaker 1: Think about it for most of us young people, and
Speaker 1: I know this from studies as well, that your real
Speaker 1: political outlook, if you have a political outlook, is often
Speaker 1: shaped eighteen nineteen twenty, when you're becoming an adult. That's
Speaker 1: exactly the time for him, and then from then on
Speaker 1: he was one of these they what's the word for
Speaker 1: auto dad act in which you teach yourself? He read,
Speaker 1: He had a brilliant IQ. He read, but he read
Speaker 1: exclusively in two kinds of literature. One was fascist literature,
Speaker 1: adi submitic literature. The other was this veneration for the Confederacy.
Speaker 1: He worshiped the Confederacy and saw in the in not
Speaker 1: the fancy Confederates like Robert E. Lee and these, but
Speaker 1: in the in the tobaccachewing kind of people like Nathan
Speaker 1: Bedford Forrest who could barely read and write, but fought
Speaker 1: like to maintain, you know, the white South in the Confederacy.
Speaker 1: And these became his heroes, and he gradually developed a
Speaker 1: whole way of appealing to people. He started out as
Speaker 1: a radio announcer in Denver after the war. Then he
Speaker 1: worked in Yazoo City, Mississippi a little while, and then
Speaker 1: he was hired and given a radio program that gradually
Speaker 1: spread to a network.
Speaker 7: In eighteen sixty five, this state right here, after the
Speaker 7: war between the States, was occupied by a federal line
Speaker 7: and one year they confiscated one hundred and ninety thousand
Speaker 7: farms and homes from these bold ridden that great Grande advirus,
Speaker 7: but they refuged in a great they refused to cooperate.
Speaker 7: In eighteen seventy four.
Speaker 4: They whipped them.
Speaker 3: They whipped them. That was the voice of ASA.
Speaker 1: I've listened to many of his broadcasts, and he was
Speaker 1: really good. It's quite different from the broadcast many of
Speaker 1: the broadcasters of the period who were stentorium and what
Speaker 1: today makes you kind of cringe to listen to them.
Speaker 1: They had this kind of booming voice which everything was
Speaker 1: overly dramatized. That's not the way he was. He acted
Speaker 1: like he was your uncle who sat down and just
Speaker 1: talked casually to you.
Speaker 3: So it was different. It was a different frequency that
Speaker 3: he could connect.
Speaker 1: Tone. Yeah, and he was so good at a kind
Speaker 1: of folksy style in which he would tell stories about
Speaker 1: most of them made up, but about his past or
Speaker 1: about other people, and then he would always link it
Speaker 1: back to the threat. He was smart enough to realize
Speaker 1: that any Semitism, particularly after the Holocaust and the news
Speaker 1: about the Holocaust didn't play very well. That didn't mean
Speaker 1: it wasn't there. There were a large number of Americans
Speaker 1: who were still any Jewish, but he realized it was
Speaker 1: kind of a third realm, so he didn't talk about
Speaker 1: that much on his radio show. What he did discover
Speaker 1: was the great weapon that white supremises had in the South,
Speaker 1: any communism, because the anti communist fervor of the nineteen
Speaker 1: forties and nineteen fifties explodes with McCarthyism, and what white
Speaker 1: Southerners immediately realized, because there were some savvy politicians for us,
Speaker 1: we have to convince white Americans outside the South that
Speaker 1: all the civil rights stuff is being formatted by the
Speaker 1: communists in the South.
Speaker 4: We have ninety eight percent a Globe Saxon rating. Not King.
Speaker 4: He is the responsible people who are record free government
Speaker 4: and who are good at and golden. You must operate.
Speaker 4: You might conduct your down from a different station. They
Speaker 4: can have any day, one world government, one world, one
Speaker 4: world in.
Speaker 1: One world rad.
Speaker 3: Those are heavy words.
Speaker 2: It's hard to reconcile that he's the guy that wrote
Speaker 2: the Education of Littletree. The political play was to say
Speaker 2: that the communists were behind the civil rights movement. Whether
Speaker 2: he believed that or not, we don't really know. Some
Speaker 2: evidence would later suggest that he didn't believe that at all,
Speaker 2: but it was just a political strategy. What many of
Speaker 2: since said is that Ace's public career in media was
Speaker 2: him playing an exaggerated character that he believed the South wanted,
Speaker 2: And therein lies the problem with political leaders and most
Speaker 2: media personalities. They've got to get ratings and votes, so
Speaker 2: they do what sells, and like a nasty social media algorithm,
Speaker 2: they give the people their base level desires of what
Speaker 2: they think they want. Do you realize how nasty and
Speaker 2: dirty social media algorithms are they'll feed you and your
Speaker 2: kids bill and tell you it's a favor In media
Speaker 2: and politics do the same thing. Do you see these
Speaker 2: reoccurring themes in American politics? Here's Dan on anti communism.
Speaker 1: And that became the theme, his theme and that of
Speaker 1: other right when radio broadcasters, not only southern but northern
Speaker 1: as well, that the Communist Party is maneuvering these people,
Speaker 1: that they're not smart enough to do it on their
Speaker 1: own and in their publications as opposed to their sort
Speaker 1: of inner publication is really the Jews that were behind it,
Speaker 1: and there would be it would sort of be on
Speaker 1: the periphery all the time, so that, for example, in
Speaker 1: his broadcast and broadcast of many of these people, they
Speaker 1: would often emphasize the Jewish names of individuals who supported
Speaker 1: civil rights because it was true as a whole Jewish
Speaker 1: Americans were a group that were much more supportive of
Speaker 1: African Americans than generally white Americans were. So he was
Speaker 1: able to get away with it mostly. He did run
Speaker 1: into a problem. In nineteen fifty five, he overstepped himself
Speaker 1: and on a radio broadcast he talked about the Jews
Speaker 1: and their role informenting this. And actually it was a
Speaker 1: group of white businessmen who were closely tied to the
Speaker 1: Jewish community in Birmingham who said to his sponsors, you
Speaker 1: got to get rid of this guy. And they succeeded,
Speaker 1: and that just reinforced his belief the Jews were behind.
Speaker 1: They fired me from my job. He later ended up
Speaker 1: doing other radio broadcasts, but never as successfully as he
Speaker 1: originally was.
Speaker 2: Asa became so radical that he outpaced his peers, but
Speaker 2: deep down he believed the Jews were behind the civil
Speaker 2: rights movement and they intended to deconstruct the current South.
Speaker 2: What's odd to me is it seems like a lot
Speaker 2: of people were interested in deconstructing the South. Here's an
Speaker 2: interesting observation from Steve Ranella about Ace's book The Education
Speaker 2: of Little Tree. Some of this just doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 5: Here's no one I stumbled over knowing about the presumptive
Speaker 5: feelings of this clansman, okay, and their antipathy and hatred
Speaker 5: of Jews and religious persecution of Jews. Okay. So here
Speaker 5: I'm reading the Education of Little Tree, and there's a
Speaker 5: guy that there's a storekeeper. The Tree guys very well,
Speaker 5: and one might look and be like, oh, of course
Speaker 5: they evade the jew the storekeeper. Okay, there's a storekeeper
Speaker 5: who's Jewish. Little Tree overhears someone referred to him as
Speaker 5: a Jew and mentions his stinginess. Little Tree goes on
Speaker 5: to say, mister Wine was not stingy. He was thrifty
Speaker 5: and paid his obligations and seeing that his money was
Speaker 5: used in the right manner. Later, he says he's worried
Speaker 5: about this, and he says to his grandpa, what is
Speaker 5: a Jew?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 5: So you're like, So, as the reader, I'm like, what's
Speaker 5: the grandpa gonna say?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 5: Knowing that here's this we have a clansman of spousing
Speaker 5: as believes, what will Grandpa's answer be? Grandpa just says,
Speaker 5: I don't know. Something is said about him in the
Speaker 5: Bible somewhere as or other must go back a long
Speaker 5: ways like the Indian I hear tell they ain't got
Speaker 5: no nation either. End the story as political rhetoric, what
Speaker 5: is that? Gaining the primary character, Littletree is introduced to
Speaker 5: a person who stereotypes this individual he's a jewey stingy,
Speaker 5: and they spend a lot of time talking about the
Speaker 5: difference between stingy and thrifty. Stingy, you just horde things thrifty,
Speaker 5: you have things that matter, so you don't spend on
Speaker 5: things that are frivolous because you want to focus on
Speaker 5: things that matter. This is a conversation they've had. Guy's
Speaker 5: not Stingy's thrifty. He just wants to know where his
Speaker 5: money's going.
Speaker 2: M It seems like it would have been an easy
Speaker 2: spot to throw him under the bus if he wanted to.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, once again, we're conflicted with the first version
Speaker 2: of Ace's life compared to the presumed life of a
Speaker 2: man that could write The Education of Littletree. Does that
Speaker 2: make any sense to you?
Speaker 3: Donan to me.
Speaker 2: Just to clarify the timeline. Asa Carter's life as a
Speaker 2: professional racial supremacist media personality was in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: into the early nineteen seventies. Asa ran for governor of
Speaker 2: Alabama in nineteen seventy against George Wallace on a platform
Speaker 2: so radical George Wallace was the moderate candidate. He claimed
Speaker 2: that Wallace had left the cause an Ace's message that
Speaker 2: had been so well received for twenty years was now obsolete.
Speaker 2: It didn't jive with the voters of Alabama and he
Speaker 2: received one point point six percent of the statewide vote.
Speaker 2: Here's Steve with an interesting tidbit on Ace's political career.
Speaker 5: This is another thing people got to go back to
Speaker 5: their history books to study up on. These guys are
Speaker 5: all Democrats, right. He was trying to get the Democratic
Speaker 5: nomination for governor, and he was running. Uh, he was
Speaker 5: running as being an absolutist on segregation. Wild Listen, I
Speaker 5: keep like, as we're talking, I keep warming up to
Speaker 5: the idea that there's just like a like a an
Speaker 5: unstable hand here. Yeah, but then you get into this.
Speaker 5: How could you write so tightly and so beautifully.
Speaker 2: It was after the devastating loss of this political race
Speaker 2: for governor that Asa began writing the novels he'd always
Speaker 2: wanted to write. He knew he'd never get published as
Speaker 2: Asa Carter, so he changed his name to Bedford Forrest Carter,
Speaker 2: which eventually just became Forest Carter and FYI.
Speaker 3: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first.
Speaker 2: Grand Wizard of the klu Klux Klan, who would later
Speaker 2: renounce his involvement in the Klan. We mentioned him before
Speaker 2: on our episode about Holt Collier. Here's Dan with more
Speaker 2: details of Ace's identity switch. So with that change of
Speaker 2: identity obviously in public, like if he's talking to Barbara Walters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's gonna be He's gonna.
Speaker 2: Star speak like Forrest Carter looked like Forest Carter talk
Speaker 2: Like did he maintain that identity like throughout his whole
Speaker 2: life during that period?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Absolutely?
Speaker 3: Was he married? What about he was married to? His
Speaker 3: wife's name was India.
Speaker 1: That's right?
Speaker 3: Is that correct? When when did he marry her?
Speaker 1: He married her right out of the navy in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seventh.
Speaker 3: Okay, so she was here for this whole Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And she was. She was very much his supporter and
Speaker 1: played along with the whole thing. Uh, she didn't even
Speaker 1: she lived. They bought a house, as I describe it
Speaker 1: the book, through a flukeish set of circumstances. He came
Speaker 1: into some money and he bought a house down in St.
Speaker 1: George Island, and she lived down there, but he spent
Speaker 1: most of his time in Alleleen.
Speaker 3: He came into some money.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy two, Asa wrote his first novel under
Speaker 2: the alias Forest Carter, which he titled Gone to Texas,
Speaker 2: and the movie rights to the book were purchased by
Speaker 2: Clint Eastwood, and he made it into his breakout movie,
Speaker 2: The Outlawed Josie Weals, and this part is absolutely wild,
Speaker 2: almost unbelievable. But knowing that he was being tracked by
Speaker 2: the FBI, ASA went to the FBI office and told
Speaker 2: them how to get in touch with him if they
Speaker 2: needed him, because he was about to quote make some
Speaker 2: money for the first time in my life, and I
Speaker 2: don't want.
Speaker 3: Anything to screw it up.
Speaker 2: This is a direct quote from the over one thousand
Speaker 2: page FBI file on ASA. He then moved to Abilene, Texas.
Speaker 2: At this point he called his son's nephews. He grew
Speaker 2: a mustache, grew out of sideburns, wore a cowboy hat,
Speaker 2: and became a new age Cherokee Indian writer. But he
Speaker 2: had some help with this new story.
Speaker 1: All of that was made possible because of one one man,
Speaker 1: a man named Don Josie, who was a wealthy, wealthy
Speaker 1: Texas hall millionaire who had given a lot of money
Speaker 1: to George Wallace and Carter had met him and they
Speaker 1: just became like brothers. And when Carter contacted him in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one and said, look, I want to change
Speaker 1: my identity and moved to Texas, and the two of
Speaker 1: them came up with this background story. Don Josie would
Speaker 1: meet when news man when he first started trying to
Speaker 1: promote his book and say, yeah, he worked for me
Speaker 1: for twenty five years as a bronco buster and Don
Speaker 1: Josie owned several ranchers. He said, he was here and
Speaker 1: there and wherever and that.
Speaker 3: So he had an accomplice.
Speaker 1: He had an accomplice who set up the background story for him.
Speaker 1: And so when anybody asked about well, why didn't even
Speaker 1: hear this? Guys, guys, you know all these years and
Speaker 1: he came up with these stories about how he was
Speaker 1: a storyteller to the Cherokee Nation. Well, it's just strange.
Speaker 1: Nobody went back to here, to North Carolina, eastern Tennessee
Speaker 1: and said, can you tell us about this? Nobody ever
Speaker 1: checked in it. You know, it's partly the power of
Speaker 1: his skills.
Speaker 2: Asa had skills. The release of the book The Outlawed
Speaker 2: Josie Wells and Eastwood making the movie was the beginning
Speaker 2: point of his new life. What's interesting is that ASA's
Speaker 2: life mirrors the plot of this movie almost to the
Speaker 2: tee Wales. As a Confederate soldier who won't give in
Speaker 2: to the ideology of a reconstructed South. Asa made a
Speaker 2: living talking about rejecting reconstruction and how the South got
Speaker 2: the shaft.
Speaker 3: Josee.
Speaker 2: Wells leaves the South under persecution from the Yankee Army and.
Speaker 3: Heads to Texas.
Speaker 2: Asa, under the persecution of the establishment, left the South
Speaker 2: and headed to Texas.
Speaker 3: Jose Wales in.
Speaker 2: The movie, makes a new life with the Comanches in Texas.
Speaker 2: Asa becomes Forrest Carter, the Cherokee Indian and has a
Speaker 2: completely new.
Speaker 3: Life in Texas. Is that not wild?
Speaker 2: It's hard to know if this guy is crazy or
Speaker 2: a genius. Now we're gonna have to hold it together
Speaker 2: and stay on track. We're talking about a lot of
Speaker 2: different books and a lot of moving parts. It's a
Speaker 2: complicated story.
Speaker 3: Bros. This is Bear Grease.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to talk to Steve about ASA's later book,
Speaker 2: the nineteen six seventy six book The Education of Little Tree.
Speaker 2: This book was even later in the progression of the
Speaker 2: Forest Carter character. I have a question for Steve about
Speaker 2: how intentional the message of that book was, or was
Speaker 2: he just writing the book he thought people would like.
Speaker 2: What I would ask too, is if he was writing
Speaker 2: this book, would his value system just be found inside
Speaker 2: the way that he would tell the story that he
Speaker 2: was that he was interested in or did he really
Speaker 2: write this book with the intention of creating people that
Speaker 2: were deeply anti government? And you know, it's like, how
Speaker 2: intentional was it?
Speaker 3: If?
Speaker 5: When I hear, in my understanding of not being a
Speaker 5: subject matter expert, when I hear a segregationist clansman, I
Speaker 5: think of someone who is deeply invested in racial hate.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's what I get.
Speaker 5: I don't think I'm going on on a limb here. Yeah,
Speaker 5: if that's what he was shooting for in this book,
Speaker 5: I like he missed the mark right If for some
Speaker 5: reason he had gotten where he was just anti establishment,
Speaker 5: he just wanted to see the whole thing burned down. Sure,
Speaker 5: if you told me that, If if you told me
Speaker 5: the Unibomber wrote that book, Okay, what the Unibomber was
Speaker 5: a radical environmentalist and he was anti establishment. Okay, if
Speaker 5: you told me that the Unibomber wrote that novel. Now
Speaker 5: a bunch of people are going to fly off the handle.
Speaker 5: They haven't read the Unibomber's manifesto. I've read the Unibomber's Manifesto.
Speaker 5: So if you're feeling like insulted right now, or that
Speaker 5: I'm saying something naughty, I know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 5: And if you read the Unibomber's Manifesto, you'll see what
Speaker 5: I'm talking about. If you told me the Unibomber wrote
Speaker 5: that book, I would buy it. Really, If you told
Speaker 5: me the Klansman wrote that book, even though we know
Speaker 5: it's true, I would initially be like, I don't I
Speaker 5: don't get it. If he was shooting for race to
Speaker 5: instill racial hatred, he missed the mark. If you was
Speaker 5: shooting to make you love your grandparents, Yeah, that's why.
Speaker 5: The more I think about it, my wife's idea that
Speaker 5: it's that maybe they I was just nuts.
Speaker 2: Steve said he would have believed it if the Unibomber ted.
Speaker 2: Kazinski wrote this book, The Education of Littletree, expounding on
Speaker 2: this is a bit like chasing the distant gobble from
Speaker 2: a bird you know you can't kill, but we're gonna
Speaker 2: do it anyway. Kazinski terrorized America by sending bombs in
Speaker 2: the mail to random people for twenty years. The FBI
Speaker 2: had over one hundred and fifty people working full time
Speaker 2: trying to find out who he was. In nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 2: he wrote an anonymous thirty five thousand word manifesto, demanding
Speaker 2: it be published or he'd send more bombs. He wanted
Speaker 2: to quote overthrow the economic and technical foundation of modern
Speaker 2: society and to protect wilderness, which is the antithesis of technology.
Speaker 2: Here is an excerpt from his manifesto, which was published
Speaker 2: in The New York Times, in Washington Post, and eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety five. Let me know if this sounds reasonable to you.
Speaker 2: Modern man is strapped down by a network of rules
Speaker 2: and regulation, and as fate depends on the actions of
Speaker 2: persons remote from him, whose decisions he cannot influence. This
Speaker 2: is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of
Speaker 2: arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable. In any technologically
Speaker 2: advanced society, the system has to regulate human behavior closely
Speaker 2: in order to function. The result is a sense of
Speaker 2: powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however,
Speaker 2: that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by
Speaker 2: psychological tools that make us want to do what the
Speaker 2: system requires. The system has to force people to behave
Speaker 2: in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural patterns
Speaker 2: of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians,
Speaker 2: and engineers. It can't function without them, so heavy pressure
Speaker 2: is put on children to excel in these fields. It
Speaker 2: isn't natural for an adolescent human being to spend the
Speaker 2: bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study.
Speaker 2: A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active
Speaker 2: contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples, the things
Speaker 2: that the children are trained to do tend to be
Speaker 2: in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians,
Speaker 2: for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits, just
Speaker 2: the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society,
Speaker 2: children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.
Speaker 2: Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to
Speaker 2: modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the
Speaker 2: number of people who cannot or will not adjust to
Speaker 2: society's requirements. Welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti government rebels,
Speaker 2: radical environmentalists, abboteurs, dropouts, and resistors.
Speaker 3: Of various kindness.
Speaker 2: Wow, now I can see what Steve meant when he
Speaker 2: said the Unibomber could have written The Education of Little Tree.
Speaker 2: And now you can say that you've heard part of
Speaker 2: the Unibomber's manifesto, and it caught you and me both
Speaker 2: by surprise. Remember what I said about the trouble with
Speaker 2: some crazy folks is that they're often really close to
Speaker 2: making rational arguments that make a lot of sense.
Speaker 3: Yep, we said that.
Speaker 2: Here is a throat punch question for Steve Ranella on
Speaker 2: Ace's writing. What in the heck was he trying to say?
Speaker 5: Man, knowing what we now know, I got two ideas
Speaker 5: about it. You asked me how I became introduced to
Speaker 5: the book. I was in a class about those political rhetoric.
Speaker 5: We read works from people who had like an axe
Speaker 5: to grind okay, and one day he gives us education Littletary.
Speaker 5: As far as I remember, he probably gave us two
Speaker 5: nights to read it. We all come in and we
Speaker 5: talked about the book for a while. Everybody's kind of
Speaker 5: blown away about the book. This is pre internet, so
Speaker 5: you can't look stuff up good. And he says, what
Speaker 5: would you think if I told you that was written
Speaker 5: by a klansman? What does that change? Now to answer that,
Speaker 5: I want to point out a thing that I also
Speaker 5: became aware of. In college, we were introduced to a
Speaker 5: lot of theories of literary criticism. You can read a text,
Speaker 5: a book. You could read this book and apply a
Speaker 5: Marxist criticism to it, meaning you're going to read this
Speaker 5: book and we're going to look at how money. How
Speaker 5: does money influence behavior? M m okay, how does like
Speaker 5: the big man eat up the little man? Okay, let's
Speaker 5: say we're going to look at it from a feminist perspective.
Speaker 5: What is the role of the grandmother?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 5: Why do when certain things are happening, the boy and
Speaker 5: the grandfather are going to them, but the grandmother doesn't participate?
Speaker 5: What does she do while they're gone? And we'll look
Speaker 5: at this whole book just and gender. Okay, that'd be
Speaker 5: like feminist criticism. But this other idea in criticism. It
Speaker 5: was popularized by this guy rolland Barts, who is a
Speaker 5: philosopher and critic, and he brought up this additional way
Speaker 5: to look at a book, which is called death of
Speaker 5: the author. To look at art or books or whatever,
Speaker 5: meaning a text is only itself. It doesn't matter what
Speaker 5: the author meant the author's biography doesn't matter. The author's
Speaker 5: background doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The text is itself.
Speaker 5: The text is its own, living, breathing thing. Don't burden
Speaker 5: it with what someone meant, right, right, When a song
Speaker 5: means something to you, Okay, let's say you listen to
Speaker 5: a song. A song means something to you, and it
Speaker 5: feels a certain way, and then someone says, oh, no,
Speaker 5: that's not.
Speaker 3: What it's about.
Speaker 5: If you listen to the lyrics carefully, and then you
Speaker 5: watch this interview with the songwriter, you'll see that it's
Speaker 5: not about heartbreak. It's about his mom, the death of
Speaker 5: the author. Stuff will be like that doesn't change it.
Speaker 5: When I hear it, that's how I feel. That's what
Speaker 5: it made me think of. I don't care what he thought.
Speaker 5: He has nothing to do with this.
Speaker 3: It's a thing.
Speaker 5: It's a piece of art, and it's my interpretation of it,
Speaker 5: and all that is just extra. So if we look
Speaker 5: at this book that way, you can't help but think
Speaker 5: it's about all the things you and I were talking
Speaker 5: about earlier. There is a lot to be said about
Speaker 5: environmentalism and how you view and respect nature. There's a
Speaker 5: lot to be said about the obligations you have to
Speaker 5: the people around you. There's a lot to be said
Speaker 5: by selfless giving generosity, right, tons of that stuff to
Speaker 5: be said. But when we bring the author back into it,
Speaker 5: which is kind of what you're getting at, we bring
Speaker 5: this clansman, this segregation is clansman author back into it,
Speaker 5: and you're like, well, what was it all about.
Speaker 3: There's three takes.
Speaker 5: One is my wife's idea. I'm gonna tell it to you,
Speaker 5: and I'm gonna leave it hanging. One take is that
Speaker 5: he changed, he was wrong. This is his apology, right.
Speaker 5: One take is that he didn't change at all. And
Speaker 5: he is a something of an anarchist. He despises the
Speaker 5: US government, he despises Catholicism, has a real ax to
Speaker 5: grind with organized religion, doesn't like the education system. He's
Speaker 5: an anarchist. When I recently emailed with the teacher that
Speaker 5: taught it, he pointed out, there's a lot to be
Speaker 5: found in here around things that you might consider that
Speaker 5: don't tread on me. Movement, anything organized, anything establishment should
Speaker 5: be torn down. Okay, maybe that's what he meant. But
Speaker 5: if that's what he meant, and this is a clan text,
Speaker 5: there's some parts that are really hard to get your
Speaker 5: head around. One of the first things that happens in
Speaker 5: the book is there they get on a bus, the
Speaker 5: grandfather gets the boy. They get on a bus. The
Speaker 5: opening scene, they step onto a bus and the bus driver.
Speaker 5: Keep in mind this is in the seventies, and we're
Speaker 5: talking of about a bus. Okay, people getting on buses
Speaker 5: and rolls of parks and the civil rights movement and
Speaker 5: how you're seated on a bus, what you're interacting actions
Speaker 5: with the person driving the bus is in here. Little
Speaker 5: Tree and his grandfather get on the bus. The bus
Speaker 5: driver makes a joke to everybody on the bus and
Speaker 5: says how, and everybody on the bus high a big, loud,
Speaker 5: sarcastic Cherokee greeting of how directed towards the people on
Speaker 5: the bus, who all laugh at the Indians and makes
Speaker 5: them feel very awkward to pay and makes it painful
Speaker 5: for them to count out and pay the bus fare.
Speaker 5: And that's like some load that's loaded. And it's not
Speaker 5: about whites, it's about the treatment of Indians. What's more,
Speaker 5: there's a part in the book where Grandpa is relating
Speaker 5: a story that happens to his father and his father
Speaker 5: had it's like a parable about the reconstruction souve and
Speaker 5: in it union soldiers, Union soldiers kill a black man.
Speaker 5: It is like, when you look at it, like stepping
Speaker 5: like never minding the death of the author thing and
Speaker 5: just taking education a little tree as this thing, which
Speaker 5: is very hard, admittedly very hard to do, knowing what
Speaker 5: we know about the individual that wrote it. And it's
Speaker 5: a clan thing, it's a segregationist thing. It's very complicated.
Speaker 5: If that's the case. My professor that I emailed with,
Speaker 5: he pointed out, if you do look at it as
Speaker 5: political rhetoric, he's not preaching to the choir right. He's
Speaker 5: taking people from the environmental movement. He's taking people who
Speaker 5: feel Native Americans were brutalized by the US federal government.
Speaker 5: He's drawing an audience here.
Speaker 1: This was on.
Speaker 5: Oprah prior to the revelation about the author. This was
Speaker 5: on like this sort of like formalized booklist library shelf
Speaker 5: of Oprah Winfrey.
Speaker 3: In the early nineties.
Speaker 5: Okay, is it so like seditious that it's taking an
Speaker 5: audience of the environmental movement back to the landers, hippies,
Speaker 5: people who sympathize with the Native American movement in the seventies.
Speaker 5: He's introducing them to anti establishment. He's introducing them to
Speaker 5: the idea that their government is evil. Like, is he
Speaker 5: that shrewd? Can I do the third one?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: My wife's like, maybe he's schizophrenic. Did you know in
Speaker 5: real life he at one point in time had his
Speaker 5: kids stop acting like he was their father. He wanted
Speaker 5: them to treat him as though he was their uncle.
Speaker 5: He died in complications of getting into a big fight,
Speaker 5: physical fight with his kid. You look at the bio
Speaker 5: and you see that there's a person who struggled with
Speaker 5: mental illness.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Maybe we're trying to go like, well, maybe he meant this.
Speaker 5: Maybe you know, we're playing checkers and he's playing chess.
Speaker 5: Yeah right, Maybe he was just straight up crazy. Maybe
Speaker 5: he's nuts, he's schizophrenic, he doesn't know what he thinks,
Speaker 5: he can't hold his family life together. He's like, and
Speaker 5: he's not the first insane person to be a great
Speaker 5: writer at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, I guess this brings up the question of
Speaker 2: what is the definition of being crazy? At an external level?
Speaker 2: This guy was incredibly intact. However, we know that he
Speaker 2: craved attention the limelight. He was an incredibly good liar,
Speaker 2: but maybe his motivations were much more simple. I asked
Speaker 2: Dan the same thing, Steve and got an interesting answer.
Speaker 2: So here's here's the big question. This is the reason
Speaker 2: I came to North Carolina. Why did Asa Carter write
Speaker 2: this book?
Speaker 1: That's a simple that's a simple answer. Asa Carter became
Speaker 1: disillusioned with politics, and not only did he realize that
Speaker 1: he was losing the battle against integration, but he realized
Speaker 1: his brand of politics was never gonna, never gonna fly.
Speaker 1: He made a very conscious decision, he told I interviewed
Speaker 1: his lawyer and he said, you know, I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: some money. I've struggled a lot, and he had he
Speaker 1: had good page bad periods, but he said, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make some money. I'm gonna be the next Hemingway. Well
Speaker 1: he wasn't the next Heimyway. But ambitions, yeah, it always
Speaker 1: had ambitions. And so he had really clearly in his
Speaker 1: mind the outlaw Josey Wales that grew out of his
Speaker 1: research and writing about Jesse and Frank James, because he
Speaker 1: saw them as a Confederate heroes, because you know, they
Speaker 1: were marauders and then became outlaws and saw and he tried
Speaker 1: to claim they weren't outlays. So I understood that about
Speaker 1: the Outlaw Josey Wales and the second Book. But the
Speaker 1: Indian thing, it was only as I began to dig
Speaker 1: into it that I really began to understand. He was
Speaker 1: drawn to Indians and cowboys for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 1: but Indians in particular because he saw Native Americans their
Speaker 1: struggle to maintain their way of life against a vicious
Speaker 1: and murderous national government army as analogous to his struggle
Speaker 1: to maintain white Southern culture. And in some ways, it
Speaker 1: was much safer to write about Indians being oppressed than
Speaker 1: white Southerners being oppressed.
Speaker 3: Now would that did he?
Speaker 2: Do you think he actually thought that that would translate
Speaker 2: to people, because that wouldn't.
Speaker 3: Be no no, But to him, it's just deep some
Speaker 3: need somebody.
Speaker 1: And I don't I don't think he thought most people
Speaker 1: would see it that way. The other thing is he
Speaker 1: was always attracted to the whole story of Native Americans,
Speaker 1: and I think it was part of that generational thing,
Speaker 1: you know, and that that is true that Americans became
Speaker 1: much more attracted to Native Americans.
Speaker 3: Once they were gone.
Speaker 1: They were gone. It was just like this mythical thing
Speaker 1: that they were. He somehow grasped that at a very
Speaker 1: early age. I was reading this interview. I mean I
Speaker 1: thought of it as something growing out of the sixties
Speaker 1: or seventies, and Fred Berger the sky that I'm really
Speaker 1: indebted to. He died suddenly of a heart attack, but
Speaker 1: he had interviewed a lot of people. But he interviewed
Speaker 1: one of his shipmates, a guy named Gordon Lackey, who
Speaker 1: was closest friend when he was in the Navy in
Speaker 1: World War Two, And it turned out he told the
Speaker 1: whole story of Little Tree when he was eighteen years old.
Speaker 3: Just as a it's a story.
Speaker 1: He just said, I grew up with my grandpa was
Speaker 1: a Cherokee America, and he told the story of.
Speaker 3: Little Tree as if it was him, Like, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he lied to this guy and a Lacke said,
Speaker 1: when Fred interviewed him, he said, you know, I thought
Speaker 1: maybe he was a bullsher but he said then most
Speaker 1: of us were in the Navy, you know, when we
Speaker 1: talked to each other. But it was fascinating to me
Speaker 1: that it age eighteen, he already had the basic outlines
Speaker 1: of that story, and it was just waiting. And he
Speaker 1: didn't begin writing that until later. But his earlier stuff
Speaker 1: he began writing. He had piles of manuscripts. His friend said,
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen fifties and sixties he was writing.
Speaker 1: So he was always he wanted to be a novelist.
Speaker 1: It was just this break when he decided to break
Speaker 1: from his political pass that it gave him an opportunity
Speaker 1: to become that writer.
Speaker 3: That's interesting, But I have a bigger question for Dan.
Speaker 2: So when you have a story like this, someone writes
Speaker 2: something later in their life, Like we know that George
Speaker 2: Wallace would later ask for forgiveness for a lot of
Speaker 2: the stuff that he did and go on this reconciliation
Speaker 2: tour and do all this stuff. Some people would read
Speaker 2: into him writing this empathetic book towards Native Americans and
Speaker 2: say that he was just a changed man. In the book,
Speaker 2: you say that he maintained being a racist his whole life. Now,
Speaker 2: how do we know that?
Speaker 1: Well, he had several friends in Texas who did not
Speaker 1: know who who was. They knew him as Forrest Carter.
Speaker 1: One of them was a woman named Louise Green, who
Speaker 1: had been a radio television personality there and it was
Speaker 1: a really interesting woman. I interviewed her at some length.
Speaker 1: She was very close to Carter. She came to terms
Speaker 1: with the fact that he was not who he said.
Speaker 3: He was after his death.
Speaker 1: After his death, I was the one that told her
Speaker 1: he was well. Yeah, And she said, what broke my
Speaker 1: heart about him was that in many ways he was
Speaker 1: a fascinating individual and she loved to be with him.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was just a great person to be
Speaker 1: around when he was in the forest. Carter personaep But
Speaker 1: she said, what what happen with By this time, the
Speaker 1: time she knew he was struggling with alcohol and what
Speaker 1: would happened was when he got drunk out it would come.
Speaker 1: And the last time she saw him was very shortly
Speaker 1: before his death. They went out to dinner in Abilene
Speaker 1: and she was worried because he was drinking too much.
Speaker 1: And this black couple came in and he started raging
Speaker 1: about he wasn't going to eat where a bunch of
Speaker 1: using the N word, and went on and onwn and own,
Speaker 1: and she kept trying to get him to stop. She said,
Speaker 1: you know, not only is it not the way I feel,
Speaker 1: I live here and I'm here. You're saying all this
Speaker 1: loudly so everybody can see it, and people will think
Speaker 1: I believe this, And he wouldn't. She said, he wouldn't stop,
Speaker 1: and she got up and left, and that was the
Speaker 1: last time she saw him alive. Well, And it was
Speaker 1: just to her it was heartbreaking because it was to
Speaker 1: her it was an individual who had such incredible skills
Speaker 1: as a writer, but also this personality which would have
Speaker 1: allowed him, as she said, to do such great things,
Speaker 1: and yet something went awry at a very young age
Speaker 1: that sent him this way.
Speaker 2: Do you think that he would be classified as some
Speaker 2: type of mental illness today, schizophrenia or bipolar or something.
Speaker 1: I don't think it would. It'd be hard to classify it.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of fanaticism we see in a lot
Speaker 1: of people. It is interesting to me that his sister,
Speaker 1: who loved him very much but who totally disagreed with him.
Speaker 1: She was chief of psychiatric nurses at the University of
Speaker 1: Alabama Birmingham Hospital, and she loved her brother. But she
Speaker 1: sat down with him on one occasion and tried to
Speaker 1: persuade him to see somebody for psychiatric help. And he
Speaker 1: never spoke to a game, he just cut himself off completely.
Speaker 1: So whether it was mental illness or a diagnosable mental illness,
Speaker 1: it clearly was a kind of compulsion and the kind
Speaker 1: of fanaticism that went to the very core of who
Speaker 1: he was. And the interviews with his nephew and her
Speaker 1: niece were most useful because they spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time with him and they talked about how he could be.
Speaker 1: It could be wonderful, He funny. He would play the
Speaker 1: guitar with his brother and sister in law and they
Speaker 1: would sing songs, and he'd tell stories, and then something
Speaker 1: would like a switch would go off, and he would
Speaker 1: particularly if you crossed him and you contradicted him, and
Speaker 1: he would become furious then And as both of both
Speaker 1: his niece and his nephew said, he could be scared.
Speaker 1: As Forrest Carter lived a life of drama and violence,
Speaker 1: his death was even more so. For years, we knew
Speaker 1: that there were suspicious circumstances. I mean, this was common
Speaker 1: knowledge at the time that he died. In the official
Speaker 1: autopsy showed that he died of being unable to regurgitate
Speaker 1: food he choked to death on him. But there were
Speaker 1: also rumors that something terrible had happened at his son's home,
Speaker 1: but no one could tell exactly what happened. And in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, I'm not to do my own horn here,
Speaker 1: but I went out to Avlene and I met Judge
Speaker 1: Samuel Matta, and I told him what I was interested
Speaker 1: in and written him ahead of time, and he got
Speaker 1: the sealed police report out and which had been sealed
Speaker 1: since no charges wherever bought, and he found away from
Speaker 1: me to get access to it even though it was sealed.
Speaker 3: I had to read the book to find out.
Speaker 1: And if you want to find out this, uh his death,
Speaker 1: which as I said, certainly has kind of biblical overtones,
Speaker 1: just read the story of Cannon Abel you read the book.
Speaker 6: Well, I am just an old rebel reckon, that is
Speaker 6: all I am. For this carpet bag of government. I
Speaker 6: do not give a dad blame. I'm glad I fit
Speaker 6: again it I'll keep fighting.
Speaker 3: Till we won.
Speaker 6: And I don't want no pardon for nothing that I've done. No,
Speaker 6: I don't want no pardon for what I was nor
Speaker 6: what I am. And I won't be reconstructed and I
Speaker 6: don't give a dad blame. This is a Sokarta may
Speaker 6: God bless you, and I thank you for listen.
Speaker 3: Doctor Dan T.
Speaker 2: Carter's book Unmasking the Klansmen was published in April twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three. You can find it on Amazon and just
Speaker 2: about anywhere books are sold. I can't thank you enough
Speaker 2: for listening to bear Grease. Be sure to listen to
Speaker 2: the undercover agent who's been assigned to play the long
Speaker 2: game on me, Brent Reeves and his new podcast, This
Speaker 2: Country Life.
Speaker 3: It's on the bear Grease feed.
Speaker 2: And one day, when I'm busted for crimes I've never committed,
Speaker 2: it'll make a great story. In the meantime, check out
Speaker 2: This Country Life, released every Friday on the bear Grease
Speaker 2: podcast feed, and be sure to check out First Light's
Speaker 2: new trace pant and jacket system for lightweight, breathable hunting
Speaker 2: gear for the South.
Speaker 3: I look forward to talking to all the folks on
Speaker 3: the bear Grease Render next week. Talk to you soon.