William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was an American neo-Nazi political activist. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he authored the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The first novel inspired multiple terrorist attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce founded the white nationalist National Alliance, an organization which he led for almost 30 years.
Born in Atlanta, Pierce received a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University in 1955 as well as a doctorate from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1962. He became an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University in that year. In 1965, he left his tenure at Oregon State University and became a senior researcher for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. He moved to the Washington, D.C. area and became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was assassinated in 1967. Pierce became co-leader of the National Youth Alliance, which split in 1974, with Pierce founding the National Alliance.
Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries (1978) depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a world war and the extermination of non-white races. Another novel by Pierce, Hunter (1989) portrays the actions of a lone-wolf white supremacist assassin. In 1985, Pierce relocated the headquarters of the National Alliance to Hillsboro, West Virginia, where he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church. Pierce spent the rest of his life in West Virginia hosting a weekly show, American Dissident Voices, and overseeing his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), as well as books which were published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. and the white power music label Resistance Records.
Early life
thumb|upright=0.65|Pierce in a high school [[military academy uniform at Allen Military Academy|left]]
William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11, 1933. He was the eldest son of Marguerite Ferrell, a journalist, and William Luther Pierce II, an insurance salesman, who married in 1929. His father had served in World War I. Through his mother, Pierce's great-great-grandfather was Thomas H. Watts, the governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederate States of America. He had one younger brother, Sanders "Sandy" Pierce.
His family moved to Norfolk, Virginia, with his father's insurance business when Pierce was four years old. Pierce's upbringing was at times difficult. Pierce's son, Kelvin, described Pierce as having been born to a mother who rarely showed affection and an alcoholic father who entirely ignored him; Marguerite would pay Pierce to find the alcohol that William Sr. stashed around the house. Pierce's father was killed in a car accident involving a teenaged driver on January 30, 1943, when Pierce was nine years old.
Following his father's death, Pierce and his brother were supported by their mother, and moved throughout the Southern United States. From the age of 10 on, Pierce worked odd jobs to help his family. Pierce attended public schools throughout the South, attending junior high in Dallas, Texas, until the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama. When his mother remarried, Pierce was sent to a military academy. His last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, where he did well academically. He worked at the school's chemistry stockrooms. Pierce later said that as a teen he had been "sort of a nerdy kid without social skills", awkward around women and with few friends. His teenage hobbies and interests were chemistry, electronics, and reading science fiction works, particularly the pulp magazine Planet Stories.
Education and physics career
alt=Black and white shot of Pierce|thumb|Pierce at Rice University, aged 18 or 19|upright=.8
Pierce earned a full scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston in 1951. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a time in mid-1955, then did his graduate studies at California Institute of Technology starting later that year. At the University of Colorado Boulder, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962. and he studied under the physicist W. H. Tantila. In 1957, Pierce married Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960.
After getting his doctorate, Pierce taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965. The only organization he belonged to at this time was the American Physical Society. At this time he considered himself largely uninterested in politics. During his education, Pierce paid little attention to the wider world; he claimed that he had initially been sympathetic to the idea of Black civil rights, but was suspicious of integration as damaging freedom of association. He was inflamed by what he viewed as a media bias against segregationists; when some of his colleagues blamed this on Jews, he became more interested in racial matters, and became increasingly militant in his thoughts on race. He blamed Jews for the civil rights movement, along with the protests against the Vietnam War. According to his son Kelvin, after Pierce became interested in racial matters he ceased to pay much attention to his children, outside of beating them. Pierce regularly physically abused his children. He worked as a senior research associate physicist at Pratt, earning a $15,400 a year salary. He received government security clearance for this job but never actually worked on classified projects. He directed a United States Air Force grant of $35,000 on semiconductors. It was directed by Jacob Young. The title is a reference to how Pierce imagined his detractors portraying him. Pierce agreed to buy Carto's share of the company; he invested more money in Resistance and made Blodgett manager, tasking him to bring out the next issue. However, despite announcing a release date of June 1999, Blodgett was unable to get the issue out, angering Pierce and many skinheads. although he personally rejected this label. When confronted with the issue by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Pierce described the term as a slander, saying that though he "admire[d] many things that Hitler wrote", the National Alliance had "formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today".