combination. While he did not personally accept the obvious racism of men such as Richard Butler and Louis Beam, Pratt did not raise any public objections during the course of the meeting. He made it abundantly clear he was ready to work with the group at Estes Park if it was ready to work with him. (In his speech Pratt charitably described his audience as Bill of Rights–style constitutionalists. No Fourteenth Amendment in that Founding Fathers document. Pratt told the assembly he had a problem with it anyway.)
Gun rights and (white) Christian nationalism: upon those two rocks the contemporary militia movement was founded in the 1990s. Perhaps Beam summed up the anger and danger present at Estes Park in a leaflet he was circulating: “The federals have made a terrible error in the Weaver case that they will long regret. Their cruelty and callous disregard for the rules of civilized warfare will have the effect of solidifying opposition to them. Long after Weaver has been tried and has beenfreed by the courts as an innocent man wrongfully accused, there will be 10,000 White men in this country who harbor in their hearts a terrible hatred for the federals and all they stand for . . .” 18
Historical Weight of Estes Park Meeting
In the first years after the formation of the militia movement, the importance of the Estes Park gathering was much debated. Ken Stern wrote of the meeting in his book on the militia movement,
A Force upon the Plain
: “The Estes Park meeting . . . may have laid the groundwork for the militia’s formation . . . Yet, its importance should not be overrated. Meetings happen every day.” 19 Conversely, Morris Dees and James Corcoran in their book on the militia,
Gathering Storm
, assigned a singular importance to the meeting.
Certainly, common sense argues that there are limitations to the ultimate importance of any particular meeting, except those where specific overt acts are planned. But the participants at Estes Park did not behave as if they were bank robbers plotting a heist. Louis Beam was not the gunman with a watch, ensuring that his cohorts escaped before the cops arrived. Neither was Pete Peters the getaway driver or Larry Pratt the man with the alibi for all. The militia movement was not the result of any conspiracy, although as a movement it eventually engendered dozens of actual criminal conspiracies.
History is always ambiguous about the meaning of specific events. Consider, for example, the January 1942 conference of Nazi leaders at Wannsee. Did they plan the “final solution” to the Jewish question at that place and only at that place? The Holocaust would have probably occurred without Wannsee. An ideology that regarded Jews as a subhuman menace guided Nazi policy long before 1942, and the mass murder of Jews had already started before that particular meeting.
Similarly, both the view that the federal government was a menace to white people and the actual formation of militias predated Estes Park. In fact, the “unorganized militia” had been a basic tenet of Posse Comitatus practice since the early 1980s. The ideology and social forces that manifested themselves in new and explosive ways after Estes Park had been in the process of (re)developing since Willis Carto and William Pierce had rescued the white supremacist movement from complete eclipse in the very early 1970s.
Nevertheless, Estes Park was unique and of significant historical weight on several counts. This was a relatively calm and deliberative meeting, absent the usual bombast and conspiracy mongering—not an everyday occurrence among racists and anti-Semites. This band ofChristian Identity leaders and Aryan types planned to organize around an issue that resonated widely and had immediate consequences. While their southern kinsmen had already campaigned à la David Duke, and those in the Midwest had created a minimovement out of dispossessed farmers in the 1980s, most of those in the Northwest tended to
Gun rights and (white) Christian nationalism: upon those two rocks the contemporary militia movement was founded in the 1990s. Perhaps Beam summed up the anger and danger present at Estes Park in a leaflet he was circulating: “The federals have made a terrible error in the Weaver case that they will long regret. Their cruelty and callous disregard for the rules of civilized warfare will have the effect of solidifying opposition to them. Long after Weaver has been tried and has beenfreed by the courts as an innocent man wrongfully accused, there will be 10,000 White men in this country who harbor in their hearts a terrible hatred for the federals and all they stand for . . .” 18
Historical Weight of Estes Park Meeting
In the first years after the formation of the militia movement, the importance of the Estes Park gathering was much debated. Ken Stern wrote of the meeting in his book on the militia movement,
A Force upon the Plain
: “The Estes Park meeting . . . may have laid the groundwork for the militia’s formation . . . Yet, its importance should not be overrated. Meetings happen every day.” 19 Conversely, Morris Dees and James Corcoran in their book on the militia,
Gathering Storm
, assigned a singular importance to the meeting.
Certainly, common sense argues that there are limitations to the ultimate importance of any particular meeting, except those where specific overt acts are planned. But the participants at Estes Park did not behave as if they were bank robbers plotting a heist. Louis Beam was not the gunman with a watch, ensuring that his cohorts escaped before the cops arrived. Neither was Pete Peters the getaway driver or Larry Pratt the man with the alibi for all. The militia movement was not the result of any conspiracy, although as a movement it eventually engendered dozens of actual criminal conspiracies.
History is always ambiguous about the meaning of specific events. Consider, for example, the January 1942 conference of Nazi leaders at Wannsee. Did they plan the “final solution” to the Jewish question at that place and only at that place? The Holocaust would have probably occurred without Wannsee. An ideology that regarded Jews as a subhuman menace guided Nazi policy long before 1942, and the mass murder of Jews had already started before that particular meeting.
Similarly, both the view that the federal government was a menace to white people and the actual formation of militias predated Estes Park. In fact, the “unorganized militia” had been a basic tenet of Posse Comitatus practice since the early 1980s. The ideology and social forces that manifested themselves in new and explosive ways after Estes Park had been in the process of (re)developing since Willis Carto and William Pierce had rescued the white supremacist movement from complete eclipse in the very early 1970s.
Nevertheless, Estes Park was unique and of significant historical weight on several counts. This was a relatively calm and deliberative meeting, absent the usual bombast and conspiracy mongering—not an everyday occurrence among racists and anti-Semites. This band ofChristian Identity leaders and Aryan types planned to organize around an issue that resonated widely and had immediate consequences. While their southern kinsmen had already campaigned à la David Duke, and those in the Midwest had created a minimovement out of dispossessed farmers in the 1980s, most of those in the Northwest tended to
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