Political Leader, Author, and Neo-Pagan Occultist. As a teenager, science-fiction fan James Hartung Madole founded the Animist Party, which supported government by an elite of geniuses. In 1949 he took over leadership of the National Renaissance Party, a Fascist movement founded by German-American Kurt Mertig, and led it for the next thirty years. Madole and the National Renaissance Party were notorious in 1960s and 1970s New York City, holding rallies in the German-American Yorkville district of Manhattan, and attracting large, angry crowds kept at bay only by policemen and Madole's own uniformed "Elite Guard" stormtroopers. As a political theorist, Madole pioneered the ideology known today as "Third Way", which saw American culture, and not Soviet Communism, as the great destabilizing and decadent force in the West. Madole also rejected the nationalist/racist Right's traditional Christian religious trappings, instead identifying with the pre-Christian Pagan spiritual and cultural heritage of Europe. Madole and his followers were the subject of an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and also gained public attention when a former Elite Guard trooper, neo-Nazi and Klan activist Daniel Burros, committed suicide after the NEW YORK TIMES revealed that he was Jewish. Madole sought to link his own movement with occult and Neo-Pagan groups such as the Church of Satan and the Odinist movement, but gained little traction. He is remembered today primarily as an early theorist of postwar neo-Fascist thought, and as a writer and networker who made connections between the worlds of esoteric spirituality and radical politics.
Political Leader, Author, and Neo-Pagan Occultist. As a teenager, science-fiction fan James Hartung Madole founded the Animist Party, which supported government by an elite of geniuses. In 1949 he took over leadership of the National Renaissance Party, a Fascist movement founded by German-American Kurt Mertig, and led it for the next thirty years. Madole and the National Renaissance Party were notorious in 1960s and 1970s New York City, holding rallies in the German-American Yorkville district of Manhattan, and attracting large, angry crowds kept at bay only by policemen and Madole's own uniformed "Elite Guard" stormtroopers. As a political theorist, Madole pioneered the ideology known today as "Third Way", which saw American culture, and not Soviet Communism, as the great destabilizing and decadent force in the West. Madole also rejected the nationalist/racist Right's traditional Christian religious trappings, instead identifying with the pre-Christian Pagan spiritual and cultural heritage of Europe. Madole and his followers were the subject of an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and also gained public attention when a former Elite Guard trooper, neo-Nazi and Klan activist Daniel Burros, committed suicide after the NEW YORK TIMES revealed that he was Jewish. Madole sought to link his own movement with occult and Neo-Pagan groups such as the Church of Satan and the Odinist movement, but gained little traction. He is remembered today primarily as an early theorist of postwar neo-Fascist thought, and as a writer and networker who made connections between the worlds of esoteric spirituality and radical politics.
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