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Reviews
A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America
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By Elinor Langer
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Metropolitan Books, New York, 2003; paperback ed., Picador USA, New York, 2004. Notes, index. 413 pages. $26.00 cloth, $15.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Lauren Kessler
University of Oregon, Eugene
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| Elinor Langer's A Hundred Little Hitlers begins with a murder. In November 1988, on a dark street corner in southeast Portland, three skinheads — members of a local neo-Nazi group called East Side White Pride — bludgeoned and beat to death an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw. Langer, a Portlander and the author of a biography of the left-wing writer and journalist Josephine Herbst, was, shocked by this brutal incident, as were most Oregonians at the time. For her the connection was not only geographic and personal — the lives of the three skinheads intersected with hers in odd ways — but also visceral. As she writes, "the word Nazi tolls for a Jew differently than it does for others" (p. 3). |
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To make sense of this senseless act but, more importantly, to try to learn something about the movement that it seemed to exemplify, Langer focused her prodigious research and journalistic skills on this local story. First writing a lengthy investigative piece for The Nation (July 16–23, 1990), Langer then continued her research for more than a decade to produce A Hundred Little Hitlers. Based on thousands of pages of official documents, from Portland Police Bureau files to civil and criminal case files, videotapes, press coverage, and scores of interviews and correspondence, the book is both a gripping narrative of the crime and the events leading up to it and a deeply disturbing account of the history of the skinhead movement. |
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The book succeeds on three levels. First, it is a highly readable, compelling work of narrative history. For non-scholars — and for scholars weary of trudging through dense academic tomes — it is an easy read on a tough subject, a serious book that wears its research lightly. Second, it is a model of how local history can and should be used: a small story told in the service of a much larger issue. It is through this one event on a street in Portland that Langer reaches out to encompass and make sense of the entire neo-Nazi movement in America. As a research technique and as a storytelling strategy, this works well. Finally, as a work of sociocultural history, the book illustrates how history is not a two-dimensional, linear progression but rather a complex, three-dimensional tapestry. Langer effectively identifies, details, and then interweaves the various elements of popular culture that came together to create the skinhead movement. Just as a mix of politics, music, drugs, fashion, and lifestyle forged the anti-racist, passivist, countercultural movement of the 1960s, so too those same basic elements coalesced to form an almost diametrically opposite movement in the 1980s. |
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Where A Hundred Little Hitlers falls short is in its exploration of the legal maneuverings that follow the murder. Part of this comes from problems constructing a strong narrative. The cast of characters is just too vast to be comprehensible, and Langer spends too much time detailing the personal histories of two wildly idiosyncratic men — Morris Dees, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger, who were locked in an odd and convoluted civil lawsuit that stemmed from the murder. The bigger problem is that the evidence does not solidly support Langer's critique of the police and criminal justice system that underlies the second half of the book. Still, this is an important and compelling work of narrative history that, as Adam Hochschild writes in a blurb on the back cover, "illuminates a whole moral universe." |
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