Matt Hale

This central Illinoisan says he's on a quest to preserve the 'white race.' And that mission is garnering attention from the media and the legal community

By Terry Bibo
Photographs by Fred Zwicky

I t was August 1993, and 22-year-old Matt Hale was already three years into his quest to preserve the " white race" from contamination by blacks and Jews. He decided to hold one of his occasional rallies for the National Socialist White American Party at Mineral Springs Park in Pekin. A 99 percent white town on the Illinois River, Pekin had long been derided by some central Illinois wags for racist views. The town battled internally over changing its team name - the Chinks - until 1981.

But by 1993, Pekin's team had become the Dragons and the town was not as receptive to Hale's message as some might have expected. He was outnumbered 20-to-1, according to some news reports at the time. Two hundred people turned out to protest the 20 racists who attended the rally. Passing motorists yelled insults and taunted Hale and his white supremacist faction. Some spit out their windows to express disdain.

Unfazed, Hale retreated to the home his great-grandfather built in nearby East Peoria, already planning the next sortie in what he terms a battle for the future of the white race. Nearly as white bread as Pekin, East Peoria never shared the same reputation for narrow-mindedness. A blue-collar town dominated by Caterpillar Tractor Co. factories, it was a magnet for thousands of poor white southerners who needed jobs in the 1930s and 1940s, and it suffered along with the rest of central Illinois when the company cut back in the mid-1980s. The resurgent East Peoria is now better known for its riverboat casino and Christmastime Festival of Lights, but it still figures largely in Hale's plans.

" I'm sure the [city] council wouldn't like this, but I do plan to make East Peoria the haven of the white race," Hale says.

Six years after the Pekin debacle, he has been rejected by yet another group that sometimes has image problems: Illinois lawyers. The Illinois Supreme Court's Committee on Character and Fitness denied the now-27-year-old Hale a law license. Hale spent the spring appealing that decision - a battle that garnered more media attention when he sought the counsel of famed attorney Alan Dershowitz - and the result of that appeal is expected any day.

" The thing that damns him most is his modest intelligence," Dershowitz says, adding we must be very careful of the " aura of violence" that surrounds Hale and his followers.

In person, the slightly built Hale is a model of tightly controlled reason. He speaks carefully and quotably, if somewhat distantly, about the origins of his views. " Matt Hale as a little kid was a person who was very much interested in the world around him," Hale says when asked where his exclusionary views originated. To hear Hale tell it, he started reading such books as Mein Kampf at the age of 12. He compared those books with what he was being taught in school and concluded the school version - " The races are equal" - did not gibe with the facts. By his assessment, all the worthwhile books and inventions and music appeared to have been created by white men.

The pivotal moment, he says, came at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor during an " after hours" for teenagers. Hale was 13, he thinks, and out with his slightly older cousin, Russ Murphy, when they spotted some interracial couples: black men with white women. " It made me nauseous," Hale says.

His cousin does not remember this, though Hale says Murphy may be the person who knows him best. It seems to have been a fairly rare occasion, as well, because Hale is not a party kind of guy. He says he doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs and doesn't eat prepared foods because whole, raw foods are more natural. For entertainment, he prefers board games or " intellectual discussion" with his cousin. Murphy says they do play chess, but that hasn't given him insights into Hale's thinking. There was no obvious cause, no beating at the hands of black men, no insults or mistreatment by Jews.

" It has boggled our minds, too, the entire family. He wasn't raised that way. There were no Klansmen."

Nevertheless, Hale has doggedly pursued his agenda for 15 years. He started a " New Reich" club in junior high school. He lectured his high school classmates on white supremacy. " I was, of course, more serious than anyone else," Hale says. " Even then I told people I would be in the news, I would make history. It was my plan to do so, even at

30 / July/August 1999 Illinois Issues

that young age."

Hale walked onto the real-world stage in 1990, when he touched off his first furor by posting racist fliers on the Bradley University campus in Peoria. He responded to the media attention and threats of expulsion from college by contacting the American Civil Liberties Union and asking others to join him in his American White Supremacist Party.

Indeed, his every move sparked a story. " I'd like the public to know that I'm so ashamed of what he's done, that he's racist," his mother, Evelyn Bowshier, told the Peoria Journal Star at the time. In what may have been her only statement to the press, she predicted the media attention " is probably just going to spur him on" and said she feared he would be beaten up, imprisoned or killed.

Hale says the family has " had a talk with" his mother about her comments and that she actually agrees with some of his agenda. Whether or not that is so - she told him she declined to comment for this article - she appears somewhat clairvoyant. Ten years later, Hale still gets media attention and every contact seems to inspire ever-more outrageous sound bites. He has held rallies and press conferences throughout central Illinois, though reporters frequently outnumber the crowds. He no longer claims to be working for white supremacy. (" That's a smear word." ) He now claims whites are being outnumbered by the " mud races" and must defend themselves. To do that, he says he has abandoned his short-lived political career - he garnered 546 votes for the East Peoria City Council in 1995, 14 percent of the vote - in favor of religion. He now heads the World Church of the Creator, a largely Internet congregation with a sophisticated Web site. " Running for office does not permeate the psyche of people like religion does," Hale says.

As his mother predicted, he has been attacked. A slightly built Jewish woman kicked him in the groin when he was gathering signatures for David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman turned congressional candidate, at a K-Mart in Morton. She says she thought he was attacking her, and he responded by beating her head against the concrete; he says the whole thing is " a hoax."

Hale has been jailed, more than once, and was convicted of a felony for obstruction of justice when he lied to police about his brother's gun during a traffic stop, though that charge was later overturned. After another incident, he sued Northwoods Mall in Peoria for his treatment by security guards who were throwing him out for distributing racist literature.

He hasn't been killed, but his career may have been dealt a mortal blow by the Illinois Supreme Court's committee. Still, he turned that into his biggest media coup yet when he asked Dershowitz to represent him in his appeal. The turmoil that resulted as Dershowitz weighed Hale's constitutional rights against his anti-Semitic views landed Hale on NBC-TV's Dateline and Today, plus CNN.

Ultimately, both sides disagreed. Hale says he was unable to pay the fees Dershowitz sought. The attorney doesn't mince words about his former potential client. " I've gotten to know people like him," Dershowitz says. " I have one test: If anyone is both reasonably intelligent and disbelieves the Holocaust, I know he is a despicable liar. There's no sane, rational person in the world who could disbelieve in the Holocaust." (Hale's take: " If more Jews were like Alan Dershowitz, the entire country would be riddled with anti-Semitism." )

Dershowitz says Hale is " an opportunist ... getting his 15 minutes of fame." The lawyer says he doesn't think Hale believes the things he says, but stops short of offering another explanation for Hale's behavior. " Deep down," he says, " there is no deep down. There's no inner core."

There is, however, an interesting circularity to Hale's life. If he appears to thrive on chaos, that may be because he was raised on it. This isn't the first time the fate of the Hale family has waited on the Illinois Supreme Court. The self-described loner and would-be attorney is back in the upstairs of his father's house in East Peoria. An Israeli flag serves as the rug of his office, where copies of the " Bible" of the World Church of the Creator are stacked against the filing cabinets. The scrawny kid one former college classmate described as " a pimple-faced geek" now pumps iron and dresses conservatively, looking a bit like the actor Joel Grey. He lives off music gigs, book sales and donations. "It's the one thing I have that isn't church-related," Hale says of his music and his one-time hopes of

31 / July/August 1999 Illinois Issues

being a classical violinist. " I'm a very frugal person. I don't require much to live."

Hale's father says very little when he shows a reporter into the house, and he has said little about his son's choices. Longtime acquaintances say Russell Hale does not share his son's views, but defends his right to speak, and that is exactly what he has said in public. Yet the father's story may be the closest one can get to understanding the son.

Russell Hale raised Matt and his three brothers after a rancorous divorce in 1980. Just 9 years old, Matt was the youngest and perhaps the most impressionable during the chaotic events of the next few years. Russell Hale was an East Peoria police officer and involved in several disputes with his superior officers. The year of his divorce, he was called mentally unfit on charges he abandoned his duties by visiting his ex-wife and threatening to kill himself while on duty. She later refused to testify; he was fired anyway. The elder Hale appealed, and fought it all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court. In 1983, the court refused to hear his case, which let an appellate ruling stand: Hale had to be rehired. To do so, the city had to reorganize the department and pay Hale $56,500 in back pay and benefits.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that Matt Hale's views crystallized at this time, according to his own account. He says he never considered any connection, and his father says the same. The older Hale considers the timing of the divorce and

32 / July/August 1999 Illinois Issues

court battles for a moment, then muses aloud, " He didn't have his mother here. Maybe that made a difference. ... If we had had a better church connection, I don't know whether that would have changed things or not. He couldn't be a true believer and follow what he does."

It is curious. In public, Matt Hale has disparaged blacks and Jews, but professes nonviolence. He has never said anything publically to downgrade women, yet violence against women has always been at the edges of his movement. His brother, David Hale, was convicted on armed violence and intimidation charges for threatening to kill his wife in 1994.

Charges were never filed against Matt Hale or Paula Erlichman after the incident at the K-Mart earlier that same year. Now 50, Erlichman says she remembers it quite well. " When he was beating my head against the cement, you cannot imagine his eyes, the hate in his eyes," she says. " I thought, 'This man hates me and he doesn't even know me.'" She says she saw the same look when Hale was on Dateline. " Only someone who's been there knows: This man is insane. I saw it in his eyes. It was the same look. It's just like Hitler."

According to Hale, however, his motivation is just the opposite. It is not hatred of other races, he says, but love of his own. " I consider that a compliment about Hitler."
Terry Bibo is a columnist and special projects director for the Peoria Journal Star.

33 / July/August 1999 Illinois Issues

Hate might be marginal in Illinois, but it's here

T here's no Prairie State David Duke politicking from the Right in the corridors of the Capitol in Springfield. There's no homegrown Fred Phelps haranguing gay mourners at funerals in Chicago. But hate groups exist and persist in Illinois.

Still, they aren't flourishing, probably because hate philosophies are disagreeable to most people and because hate factions are disorganized, according to observers and leaders such as Matt Hale, the 27-year-old East Peorian who heads the white separatist World Church of the Creator.

Nationwide, there are a lot of hate groups, according to Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, a quarterly publication that tracks the radical Right. "There were 537 hate groups in the United States in 1998," Potok says - a 13 percent increase from 1997. Each state has at least one, except Iowa, Maine, North Dakota and South Dakota. Seventeen exist in Illinois, though that's fewer than in 1997.

"Organizations themselves don't indicate activity," Potok says. "They range from the Council of Conservative Citizens, with 15,000 members nationwide, to some outfits with two or three people and a post office box." But, Potok adds there has been considerable Klan-like and neo-Nazi activities in the Midwest, particularly in the Rust Belt, where higher-paying manufacturing jobs have declined. "They seem to hang on in areas with a lot of unemployment."

Potok's judgment is similar to Hale's, who has said, "Most of our members are working class. They have the least to lose, and they don't have a lot of money, so they can get involved in our movement without much retaliation."

Others say most Illinoisans are tolerant now, but changes in strategy by hate groups elsewhere haven't happened in Illinois, so there's still some risk people could be convinced to engage in hate activities disguised as something else.

"Illinois isn't much different from anywhere in the country. Hate exists, racism exists, and most people acknowledge that," says Essie Rutledge, a sociology professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb. "But since the Civil Rights movement, there's been much more of a public sense of impropriety, of it just being wrong to be racist. It's generally not acceptable in society." Still, she warns, people may be more receptive to hate messages if they're expressed as white unity.

There's little unity among the groups. Discussing Duke, Hale has commented, "David Duke, in our opinion, has gone too far in his denunciation of his past and Adolf Hitler. He has also tried to appease the Jews, which we, of course, find absolutely abhorrent." Duke, a former Klan leader of Louisiana, served in the legislature and ran for a seat in Congress.

Politics has been disappointing for Hale, who won just 14 percent of the vote in a 1995 East Peoria City Council election. But it still offers potential, he's said. "When I run again for city council, I will be running as much as anything to spread the word of creativity and the white racial cause. Whether I win or not is not even really all that important."

Spreading the message is also a defense against hate, says George Gordon, an active member of the Jewish congregation of Moses Montefiore Temple in Bloomington. "There hasn't been a major outbreak of racism or hate crimes in Bloomington-Normal, but a lot of local people have made a real effort to be proactive on racism and other hate. We're trying to head it off." Gordon has taken part in the series of "Not in Our Town" demonstrations supported by minority advocates, gay activists, organized labor and clergy. "What's the old saying? 'Evil will triumph if good people do nothing'? Well, we want to do something."

A political science professor at Illinois State University in Normal, Gordon believes social burdens can pressure people to seek scapegoats. "When there are uncertain times, some people look for certainty," he says. "Hate groups try to provide that. Sometimes more rural or remote areas can be breeding grounds because people are relatively out of the way and may feel alienated. At other times, it's just people who feel out of it, who feel they have no influence on power."

32 / July/August 1999 Illinois Issues



Like Hale, Fred Phelps offers absolutes to people - in his case, those who may feel uncomfortable, confused or shocked by gays and lesbians. But the Kansas minister is more of a zealot. He picketed the funeral of gay torture victim Matthew Shepard, and demonstrated at the funerals of Barry Goldwater, whose son is a homosexual, gay journalist Randy Shilts and even Al Gore Sr., the former U.S. Senator whose son, Phelps believes, is part of a White House that is too cooperative with gays and lesbians. "Phelps is another kettle of fish altogether," Gordon says. "Phelps is much worse than Hale. Hale's only 27; maybe he's still learning. Phelps should know better."

Effective responses to such hate are education and openness, says Jay Miller, executive director of the Illinois affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has 13 chapters statewide. "When hate groups spout hate speech, censorship is not the answer," Miller says. "The answer to bad speech is good speech. After all, if there's suppression, who's going to decide what's suppressed? Whoever has power, and that's usually the government." Hale has a narrow spectrum of ideas, he adds. "Government lies are much harder to filter."

Miller says he has faith in Illinoisans. "Sure, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but given truth - which, granted, can be hard to determine - people usually will make good decisions. Truth usually will out in an open society."

One wide-open marketplace of ideas is the Internet, where hundreds of Web sites have been identified as promoting hate by HateWatch, a Cambridge, Mass.-based resource group that monitors bigotry on the Web.

Is hate one ideology?

Phelps has said, "A sovereign God has been proposed to put a little restraint on these wild, promiscuous, anal-copulating beasts. That's what the Bible calls them." Hale has said, "I recognize the white race as the race which has created all worthwhile culture and progress on this planet. The niggers and other mud races, which are anti-civilization by nature, have been 'tolerated,' the result being that the civilization is gradually ceasing to exist. ... Those who reign, therefore, are responsible for the growing mayhem in our country. They are responsible for the growing destruction of the American civilization."

Hale concedes philosophical divisions within much of the radical Right. "These factions will slip away, in a sense," he says. "I believe that will happen when times get bad enough in this country."

Hale was appointed three years ago to replace World Church of the Creator head Ben Klassen, who committed suicide. Hale's title is Pontifex Maximus. The group, founded in 1973, has 46 chapters in 17 states, according to Intelligence Report. And some have been associated with criminal activity, according to Mark Monteyne, an Illinois State Police crime intelligence analyst who coordinates "threat groups" from his Springfield office.

"Extreme beliefs are not cause for us to track activities," he adds. "We follow guidelines, and crime is the predicate. A group or individual has to have posed a potential threat, something tangible. And fortunately in this state, there's not a lot of that type of criminal activity tied to Hale's [group] or other hate groups." 

Bill Knight teaches journalism at Western Illinois University in Macomb.

33 / July/August 1999 Illinois Issues

|Back to Periodicals Available| |Table of Contents| |Back to Illinois Issues 1999|