I've started going door to door trying to find out something about the most famous writer of this area, man named Asa Carter Rolle under the pen name of Forest Carter. She said, get out of here and don't come back.
This is part two of our con Man series on the double life of as of Forrest Carter. We're diving into the gritty details of the violence, hate, and conspiracy philosophies that theme the first forty five years of his life and how in the last decade of his life he transformed into an unrecognizable Cherokee Indian author who wanted to be America's next heming Way and he almost did
it once again. Author of Unmasking the Klansman, doctor Dan T. Carter, and Steve Runella of Meat Eater lead the way, as my guests, brace yourself because our windy trail will be treacherous. As we'll talk about the beating of jazz singer Nat King Cole read from the Unibomber's manifesto, and we'll begin to understand how Asa Carter did what he did. We're going neck deep into the mind of a con man for real.
I don't think you're gonna want to miss this.
One.
If you were shooting for race to instill racial hatred, you missed the mark. If you're shooting to make you love for your grandparents.
Yeah, my name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as good as the places we explored.
While I was in the middle of doing my research on the Wallace biography George Wallace, I watched the educational Little Tree Climb. From being a university press book with five thousand printing of five thousand books, suddenly it was one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list. And as I considered it, I was probably more indignant than I should have been. I thought, this is the guy, this is a lie.
And I read the book. I thought, there's nothing wrong with the book, but there is something wrong with claiming to be some Native American, having an Indian ancestry and using it to sell your book. So I contacted the New York Times, and actually when I first contacted they didn't believe me. They said, no, he has a long
record as a novelist. So I sent him a statement from the ambulance driver who he died in nineteen seventy nine in Abilene after a biblical death that I described in the book, and he was shipped out of Abilene by air as Forrest Carter and the herse driver I talked to, who said, all I know is when he arrived he was Forrest Carter, and when I buried him, he was Acer Carter.
That was doctor Dan T. Carter.
He's no relation to Asa. And on episode one of our Cotton Man series, we dove deep into the contents of a book published in nineteen seventy six called The Education of Little Tree, written by a man who claimed he was a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter, and his book was semi autobiographical. It's brilliant prose about an orphan Native America boy raised by his grandparents while being taught moral lessons about life through their connection to the land and the people in their community.
It gives poignant insight.
Into empathy, love, and integrity towards all shades of people except politicians, the government, and anything organized and institutionalized by man, which all these things are inherently corrupt. This all sounds pretty reasonable. Moonshine and deer hunting, fox hunting with hounds, predator prey relationships, turkey trapping mules, whooper will lore, and how to tell when a watermelon is ripe is all in.
The book too.
It teems with the rich mountain culture of the Great Depression era impoverished Southern Appalachia. However, there's a catch that was relatively unknown until nineteen ninety one when a New York Times article by doctor Dan T. Carter, who we just talked to expose the author as a Carter. And he wasn't a Cherokee Indian, but he was an ardent white supremacist, considered radical even by others in the movement. He was a leader in the klu Klux Klan, under
constant surveillance from the FBI. He was involved in several acts of violence, and he was a speech writer for Alabama Governor George Wallace Asa. Carter was a con man. He was a professional white supremacist, dedicated to his craft. He was a wordsmith, an orator, an actor. He had an IQ of one hundred and thirty eight, and some considered him a media and marketing genius.
And I say segregation now, segregation to Mara, and segregation forever.
Those famous words spoken by George Wallace were written by Asa Carter. Today there is a one thousand page FBI folder holding all all the surveillance done on Asa. He was suspicioned to be a dangerous man? Is that why he had to change his identity? But the latter part of his life, his writing, did that evidence a changed man. We're contrasting the two external data points we have on
his life. Number one a brilliant book of empathy to Native Americans and number two, a professional life dedicated to racial supremacy. Racism is typically rooted in a desire to preserve one's culture at the detriment of another. It's the manifestation of a fear and insecurity. But it's also misguided love of one's own culture. But loving your culture isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd say most people of the world appreciate their culture. But if we're trying to really
understand who Asa Carter was. I think we've got to see and acknowledge the mechanics at play. In Ace's case, he was very interested in preserving the Anglo Saxon South, which he believed had been taken advantage of in the post Civil War reconstruction, which isn't an outlandish statement. However, the philosophy of his hate preyed on people's bitterness, weakness, and fear. The rudimentary, carnal, corrupt ideology produced nothing but more brokenness. What makes crazy men so dangerous is how
close they are to being incredibly normal. I'd also like to say that I'm not telling this story to demonize the South, nor suggests that we're a bunch of racists down here.
On the contrary, this.
Story is so extreme it stands out like a strutton gobbler in a wheat field. To say that the South hasn't massively moved forward in racial reconciliation since the Jim Crow days would be inaccurate, And it would be as inaccurate to say that Rayism doesn't exist here in twenty twenty three. And I think stories like this are important to talk about. I think it helps us understand where some of this stuff comes from and how to fix it.
It's important to remember that Asa Carter died at the age of fifty four in nineteen seventy nine, the year I was born, So we're just guessing about his motivations. Here's doctor Dan T. Carter, who I'm gonna call Dan to keep things simple on this podcast, who is now eighty one years old and sharp as attack. He's going to tell us about his on the ground research on Asa in the nineteen nineties.
Well, the summer nineteen ninety one, when the posthumous book Education Little Tree became so popular, I thought I gotta fine something about this guy. So I had been in Alabama doing a lot of research, and I drove up to Aniston, went to the local library. They were very helpful, but I couldn't exact actually find out where he lived. I knew the area, Darmanville. It was called a rural area, so I drove out there. My life was with me and and I think, I'm I could be a con man.
I guess uh. I was never dishonest with anybody, but I would always say I'd go up to doors or busy. I went to several small businesses there and said I'm trying to find out something about the most famous writer of the area, man named Asa Carter Rolle under the pen name of Forest Carter. Uh, and uh, everybody either cleaned they didn't know anything. But then I started going door to door and.
Uh, this is real journalism.
And some fair number of people didn't you know. They were younger, they didn't know, but it was older people without accept I started to say almost but without exception, they either became hostile or they wouldn't talk to me. And years later, when I got the FBI files, I found out why the local community resented the fact that when he was active as a right wing radio announcer and everything lived there, he was under constant suspicion by
the FBI. They were constantly monitoring, They follow him, they park at the end of his driveway. And this is the middle of the Civil rights movement. These people didn't like government people anyway, and they saw this kind of persecution of their hometown.
Boy.
So I finally found a small engine shop and I talked to the guy. He said, I don't know anything about him, what he did. He just didn't want to talk to me. And as I left, one of the mechanics older guy walked out behind and he motioned me over and I went over and he said, well listen. He said, I wasn't one of Asi's boys, he said boys part of his clan group. But he said, I know a boy he said, who's real good friends with ASA's son, Asa Jr. And I said, I'll tell you
how to find his house. So I drove up there, went inside, talked to his wife first, and she got her husband. She was cheerful in everything, and he came down and I explained what I wanted in didn't sale word. He went back upstairs. I could hear him on the phone, but I couldn't hear what he was saying, and his wife was kind of embarrassed. She said, I don't know what's going So she walked up the stairs to the top of the stairs for a minute. She came running
down the stairs. She said, get out of here right now, and I said, what do you mean. She said, get out of here and don't come back. And I don't know what he was promising to do, but it clearly was not a good idea to stay there. So I left and he came running out on the porch just as I drove off.
He was hot. Dan would later receive some veiled threats of violence from others after or his New York Times story broke neighbors standing up for the reputation of neighbors is conceivable, but so was violence in the stratosphere of as of Carter's. On April tenth, nineteen fifty six, jazz singer Nat King Cole was attacked on stage in Birmingham, Alabama, and members of ass klu Klux Klan group did it well.
They say that the reason I was man attack here was because of a feeling against rock and roll of music and Negro music so called.
Now what do you feel about that?
What I mean?
If that was the case, then I'm the wrong guy.
You're not rock and roll. I don't think so.
I think if you heard me before, I'm sure you would ask me that.
If you heard me before, what do you know what rock and roll is?
That was Nat king Cole being interviewed about the attack. The Klan was very concerned about the racial crossover popularity of black musicians and the danger craze of rock and roll music. Six men were arrested for the attack, and ASA Carter would set up a legal defense fund for them, declaring them political prisoners. Asa was incredibly media savvy and
knew how to turn a story. In a non related incident, Asa would be accused but acquitted of shooting two men with a forty four magnum at a clan meeting in downtown Birmingham. These men had accused him of stealing money and he shot him. Lots of people saw it happen, but nobody would talk against Asa, so they had no evidence. But it's widely believed that he did shoot these men. But let's get back to Dan being in Alabama in
the early nineteen nineties trying to learn about Asa. I asked him how Asa could have pulled off this double life so well.
It's partly the power of his skills. When he was in high school, I interviewed one of his high school friends and he was in a high school play. And this classmate of his said it was embarrassing, and I said, because he was bad. He said, no, is because the rest of these were high school kids and he was like a Hollywood actor. He was totally at ease.
On the stage.
His lines were delivered like a professional actor, and it.
Made the whole made it awkward.
To watch. You know, so from the very beginning he had these skills. When he decided after he got out of the Navy to go to the work to University of Colorado. He had done his naval training there during the war. He had graduated from high school, but it was a rural high school in Alabama, and the entrance person at the University of Colorado, well, I don't know about this, so would you mind taking IQ test? It was one hundred and thirty eight. So there was never
any doubt about how really smart he was. He made a lot of political misjudgments, but in terms of intelligence, he was very capable and a great performer.
He was like a Hollywood actor.
Asa was gifted with words, with reading people and had instinctual insight into the way humans operated, what compelled them, what scared them, what moved them. Most dynamic leaders have this capability. He knew what people wanted to hear. Here's Dan with some of Ace's deep background.
Asa Carter's had a background very much like mine. He grew up on a small farm in northeast Alabama, near Anniston, and there's no evidence at all during his high school years from his classmates that he was anything other than a typical white Southern boy. I mean, sure all of us of that generation, his generation even up to mine, were unconsciously racist, but there's nothing to indicate he was viril und about it at all or even obsessed about it.
So there was nothing, you know, in his early childhood that indicated this. And then he had some traumatic event. He enlisted in the Navy in the officer training program in nineteen forty three, and he flucked out, not because he wasn't smart, but because he was. He went to a rural high school that just did not prepare him for the rigorous kind of program involving mathematics and other things. He just didn't have the background, and it really embittered him.
And he was now eighteen, almost nineteen years old. He goes in the Navy. He becomes a radio operator, a very courageous one. He serves in combat. But while he's on a ship in the Pacific, he meets a small group of people who are studying a series of race acist, anti submitted anti black writers. Gerald L. K. Smith names that you might not be familiar with the day, but
were really big in the nineteen thirties and forties. Many of them growing out of the fascist movement of the nineteen thirties, and they couldn't talk about during the war. Obviously we were all in the war against it, but secretly many of them really really supported Hitler and they were fine with the war against Japan. That was why Carter always said, I was glad to fight the Japs,
but I didn't want to fight my Aaryan brothers. And he became obsessed with this during the time he was the Navy, and that was a turning point in his life. Think about it for most of us young people, and I know this from studies as well, that your real political outlook, if you have a political outlook, is often shaped eighteen nineteen twenty, when you're becoming an adult. That's exactly the time for him, and then from then on he was one of these they what's the word for
auto dad act in which you teach yourself? He read, He had a brilliant IQ. He read, but he read exclusively in two kinds of literature. One was fascist literature, adi submitic literature. The other was this veneration for the Confederacy.
He worshiped the Confederacy and saw in the in not the fancy Confederates like Robert E. Lee and these, but in the in the tobaccachewing kind of people like Nathan Bedford Forrest who could barely read and write, but fought like to maintain, you know, the white South in the Confederacy. And these became his heroes, and he gradually developed a whole way of appealing to people. He started out as
a radio announcer in Denver after the war. Then he worked in Yazoo City, Mississippi a little while, and then he was hired and given a radio program that gradually spread to a network.
In eighteen sixty five, this state right here, after the war between the States, was occupied by a federal line and one year they confiscated one hundred and ninety thousand farms and homes from these bold ridden that great Grande advirus, but they refuged in a great they refused to cooperate. In eighteen seventy four.
They whipped them.
They whipped them. That was the voice of ASA.
I've listened to many of his broadcasts, and he was really good. It's quite different from the broadcast many of the broadcasters of the period who were stentorium and what today makes you kind of cringe to listen to them. They had this kind of booming voice which everything was overly dramatized. That's not the way he was. He acted like he was your uncle who sat down and just talked casually to you.
So it was different. It was a different frequency that he could connect.
Tone. Yeah, and he was so good at a kind of folksy style in which he would tell stories about most of them made up, but about his past or about other people, and then he would always link it back to the threat. He was smart enough to realize that any Semitism, particularly after the Holocaust and the news about the Holocaust didn't play very well. That didn't mean
it wasn't there. There were a large number of Americans who were still any Jewish, but he realized it was kind of a third realm, so he didn't talk about
that much on his radio show. What he did discover was the great weapon that white supremises had in the South, any communism, because the anti communist fervor of the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties explodes with McCarthyism, and what white Southerners immediately realized, because there were some savvy politicians for us, we have to convince white Americans outside the South that all the civil rights stuff is being formatted by the communists in the South.
We have ninety eight percent a Globe Saxon rating. Not King. He is the responsible people who are record free government and who are good at and golden. You must operate. You might conduct your down from a different station. They can have any day, one world government, one world, one world in.
One world rad.
Those are heavy words.
It's hard to reconcile that he's the guy that wrote the Education of Littletree. The political play was to say that the communists were behind the civil rights movement. Whether he believed that or not, we don't really know. Some evidence would later suggest that he didn't believe that at all,
but it was just a political strategy. What many of since said is that Ace's public career in media was him playing an exaggerated character that he believed the South wanted, And therein lies the problem with political leaders and most media personalities. They've got to get ratings and votes, so they do what sells, and like a nasty social media algorithm, they give the people their base level desires of what
they think they want. Do you realize how nasty and dirty social media algorithms are they'll feed you and your kids bill and tell you it's a favor In media and politics do the same thing. Do you see these reoccurring themes in American politics? Here's Dan on anti communism.
And that became the theme, his theme and that of other right when radio broadcasters, not only southern but northern as well, that the Communist Party is maneuvering these people, that they're not smart enough to do it on their own and in their publications as opposed to their sort of inner publication is really the Jews that were behind it, and there would be it would sort of be on the periphery all the time, so that, for example, in his broadcast and broadcast of many of these people, they
would often emphasize the Jewish names of individuals who supported civil rights because it was true as a whole Jewish Americans were a group that were much more supportive of African Americans than generally white Americans were. So he was able to get away with it mostly. He did run into a problem. In nineteen fifty five, he overstepped himself and on a radio broadcast he talked about the Jews
and their role informenting this. And actually it was a group of white businessmen who were closely tied to the Jewish community in Birmingham who said to his sponsors, you got to get rid of this guy. And they succeeded, and that just reinforced his belief the Jews were behind. They fired me from my job. He later ended up doing other radio broadcasts, but never as successfully as he originally was.
Asa became so radical that he outpaced his peers, but deep down he believed the Jews were behind the civil rights movement and they intended to deconstruct the current South. What's odd to me is it seems like a lot of people were interested in deconstructing the South. Here's an interesting observation from Steve Ranella about Ace's book The Education of Little Tree. Some of this just doesn't make any sense.
Here's no one I stumbled over knowing about the presumptive feelings of this clansman, okay, and their antipathy and hatred of Jews and religious persecution of Jews. Okay. So here I'm reading the Education of Little Tree, and there's a guy that there's a storekeeper. The Tree guys very well, and one might look and be like, oh, of course they evade the jew the storekeeper. Okay, there's a storekeeper who's Jewish. Little Tree overhears someone referred to him as
a Jew and mentions his stinginess. Little Tree goes on to say, mister Wine was not stingy. He was thrifty and paid his obligations and seeing that his money was used in the right manner. Later, he says he's worried about this, and he says to his grandpa, what is a Jew?
Okay?
So you're like, So, as the reader, I'm like, what's the grandpa gonna say?
Now?
Knowing that here's this we have a clansman of spousing as believes, what will Grandpa's answer be? Grandpa just says, I don't know. Something is said about him in the Bible somewhere as or other must go back a long ways like the Indian I hear tell they ain't got no nation either. End the story as political rhetoric, what is that? Gaining the primary character, Littletree is introduced to a person who stereotypes this individual he's a jewey stingy, and they spend a lot of time talking about the
difference between stingy and thrifty. Stingy, you just horde things thrifty, you have things that matter, so you don't spend on things that are frivolous because you want to focus on things that matter. This is a conversation they've had. Guy's not Stingy's thrifty. He just wants to know where his money's going.
M It seems like it would have been an easy spot to throw him under the bus if he wanted to. It's yeah, once again, we're conflicted with the first version of Ace's life compared to the presumed life of a man that could write The Education of Littletree. Does that make any sense to you?
Donan to me.
Just to clarify the timeline. Asa Carter's life as a professional racial supremacist media personality was in the nineteen fifties into the early nineteen seventies. Asa ran for governor of Alabama in nineteen seventy against George Wallace on a platform so radical George Wallace was the moderate candidate. He claimed that Wallace had left the cause an Ace's message that had been so well received for twenty years was now obsolete.
It didn't jive with the voters of Alabama and he received one point point six percent of the statewide vote. Here's Steve with an interesting tidbit on Ace's political career.
This is another thing people got to go back to their history books to study up on. These guys are all Democrats, right. He was trying to get the Democratic nomination for governor, and he was running. Uh, he was running as being an absolutist on segregation. Wild Listen, I keep like, as we're talking, I keep warming up to the idea that there's just like a like a an unstable hand here. Yeah, but then you get into this. How could you write so tightly and so beautifully.
It was after the devastating loss of this political race for governor that Asa began writing the novels he'd always wanted to write. He knew he'd never get published as Asa Carter, so he changed his name to Bedford Forrest Carter, which eventually just became Forest Carter and FYI.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first.
Grand Wizard of the klu Klux Klan, who would later renounce his involvement in the Klan. We mentioned him before on our episode about Holt Collier. Here's Dan with more details of Ace's identity switch. So with that change of identity obviously in public, like if he's talking to Barbara Walters.
Yeah, he's gonna be He's gonna.
Star speak like Forrest Carter looked like Forest Carter talk Like did he maintain that identity like throughout his whole life during that period?
Yeah?
Absolutely?
Was he married? What about he was married to? His wife's name was India.
That's right?
Is that correct? When when did he marry her?
He married her right out of the navy in nineteen forty seventh.
Okay, so she was here for this whole Yeah, Yeah.
And she was. She was very much his supporter and played along with the whole thing. Uh, she didn't even she lived. They bought a house, as I describe it the book, through a flukeish set of circumstances. He came into some money and he bought a house down in St. George Island, and she lived down there, but he spent most of his time in Alleleen.
He came into some money.
In nineteen seventy two, Asa wrote his first novel under the alias Forest Carter, which he titled Gone to Texas, and the movie rights to the book were purchased by Clint Eastwood, and he made it into his breakout movie, The Outlawed Josie Weals, and this part is absolutely wild,
almost unbelievable. But knowing that he was being tracked by the FBI, ASA went to the FBI office and told them how to get in touch with him if they needed him, because he was about to quote make some money for the first time in my life, and I don't want.
Anything to screw it up.
This is a direct quote from the over one thousand page FBI file on ASA. He then moved to Abilene, Texas. At this point he called his son's nephews. He grew a mustache, grew out of sideburns, wore a cowboy hat, and became a new age Cherokee Indian writer. But he had some help with this new story.
All of that was made possible because of one one man, a man named Don Josie, who was a wealthy, wealthy Texas hall millionaire who had given a lot of money to George Wallace and Carter had met him and they just became like brothers. And when Carter contacted him in nineteen seventy one and said, look, I want to change my identity and moved to Texas, and the two of
them came up with this background story. Don Josie would meet when news man when he first started trying to promote his book and say, yeah, he worked for me for twenty five years as a bronco buster and Don Josie owned several ranchers. He said, he was here and there and wherever and that.
So he had an accomplice.
He had an accomplice who set up the background story for him. And so when anybody asked about well, why didn't even hear this? Guys, guys, you know all these years and he came up with these stories about how he was a storyteller to the Cherokee Nation. Well, it's just strange. Nobody went back to here, to North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and said, can you tell us about this? Nobody ever checked in it. You know, it's partly the power of his skills.
Asa had skills. The release of the book The Outlawed Josie Wells and Eastwood making the movie was the beginning point of his new life. What's interesting is that ASA's life mirrors the plot of this movie almost to the tee Wales. As a Confederate soldier who won't give in to the ideology of a reconstructed South. Asa made a living talking about rejecting reconstruction and how the South got the shaft.
Josee.
Wells leaves the South under persecution from the Yankee Army and.
Heads to Texas.
Asa, under the persecution of the establishment, left the South and headed to Texas.
Jose Wales in.
The movie, makes a new life with the Comanches in Texas. Asa becomes Forrest Carter, the Cherokee Indian and has a completely new.
Life in Texas. Is that not wild?
It's hard to know if this guy is crazy or a genius. Now we're gonna have to hold it together and stay on track. We're talking about a lot of different books and a lot of moving parts. It's a complicated story.
Bros. This is Bear Grease.
Now we're going to talk to Steve about ASA's later book, the nineteen six seventy six book The Education of Little Tree. This book was even later in the progression of the Forest Carter character. I have a question for Steve about how intentional the message of that book was, or was he just writing the book he thought people would like.
What I would ask too, is if he was writing this book, would his value system just be found inside the way that he would tell the story that he was that he was interested in or did he really write this book with the intention of creating people that were deeply anti government? And you know, it's like, how intentional was it?
If?
When I hear, in my understanding of not being a subject matter expert, when I hear a segregationist clansman, I think of someone who is deeply invested in racial hate.
Okay, that's what I get.
I don't think I'm going on on a limb here. Yeah, if that's what he was shooting for in this book, I like he missed the mark right If for some reason he had gotten where he was just anti establishment, he just wanted to see the whole thing burned down. Sure, if you told me that, If if you told me the Unibomber wrote that book, Okay, what the Unibomber was a radical environmentalist and he was anti establishment. Okay, if
you told me that the Unibomber wrote that novel. Now a bunch of people are going to fly off the handle. They haven't read the Unibomber's manifesto. I've read the Unibomber's Manifesto. So if you're feeling like insulted right now, or that I'm saying something naughty, I know what I'm talking about. And if you read the Unibomber's Manifesto, you'll see what I'm talking about. If you told me the Unibomber wrote
that book, I would buy it. Really, If you told me the Klansman wrote that book, even though we know it's true, I would initially be like, I don't I don't get it. If he was shooting for race to instill racial hatred, he missed the mark. If you was shooting to make you love your grandparents, Yeah, that's why. The more I think about it, my wife's idea that it's that maybe they I was just nuts.
Steve said he would have believed it if the Unibomber ted. Kazinski wrote this book, The Education of Littletree, expounding on this is a bit like chasing the distant gobble from a bird you know you can't kill, but we're gonna do it anyway. Kazinski terrorized America by sending bombs in the mail to random people for twenty years. The FBI had over one hundred and fifty people working full time
trying to find out who he was. In nineteen ninety five, he wrote an anonymous thirty five thousand word manifesto, demanding it be published or he'd send more bombs. He wanted to quote overthrow the economic and technical foundation of modern society and to protect wilderness, which is the antithesis of technology. Here is an excerpt from his manifesto, which was published in The New York Times, in Washington Post, and eighteen ninety five. Let me know if this sounds reasonable to you.
Modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulation, and as fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him, whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable. In any technologically advanced society, the system has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function. The result is a sense of
powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires. The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural patterns of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. It can't function without them, so heavy pressure
is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn't natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples, the things that the children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits, just
the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society, children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society's requirements. Welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti government rebels, radical environmentalists, abboteurs, dropouts, and resistors.
Of various kindness.
Wow, now I can see what Steve meant when he said the Unibomber could have written The Education of Little Tree. And now you can say that you've heard part of the Unibomber's manifesto, and it caught you and me both by surprise. Remember what I said about the trouble with some crazy folks is that they're often really close to making rational arguments that make a lot of sense.
Yep, we said that.
Here is a throat punch question for Steve Ranella on Ace's writing. What in the heck was he trying to say?
Man, knowing what we now know, I got two ideas about it. You asked me how I became introduced to the book. I was in a class about those political rhetoric. We read works from people who had like an axe to grind okay, and one day he gives us education Littletary. As far as I remember, he probably gave us two nights to read it. We all come in and we talked about the book for a while. Everybody's kind of blown away about the book. This is pre internet, so
you can't look stuff up good. And he says, what would you think if I told you that was written by a klansman? What does that change? Now to answer that, I want to point out a thing that I also became aware of. In college, we were introduced to a lot of theories of literary criticism. You can read a text, a book. You could read this book and apply a Marxist criticism to it, meaning you're going to read this book and we're going to look at how money. How
does money influence behavior? M m okay, how does like the big man eat up the little man? Okay, let's say we're going to look at it from a feminist perspective. What is the role of the grandmother?
Okay?
Why do when certain things are happening, the boy and the grandfather are going to them, but the grandmother doesn't participate? What does she do while they're gone? And we'll look at this whole book just and gender. Okay, that'd be like feminist criticism. But this other idea in criticism. It was popularized by this guy rolland Barts, who is a philosopher and critic, and he brought up this additional way to look at a book, which is called death of
the author. To look at art or books or whatever, meaning a text is only itself. It doesn't matter what the author meant the author's biography doesn't matter. The author's background doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The text is itself. The text is its own, living, breathing thing. Don't burden it with what someone meant, right, right, When a song means something to you, Okay, let's say you listen to
a song. A song means something to you, and it feels a certain way, and then someone says, oh, no, that's not.
What it's about.
If you listen to the lyrics carefully, and then you watch this interview with the songwriter, you'll see that it's not about heartbreak. It's about his mom, the death of the author. Stuff will be like that doesn't change it. When I hear it, that's how I feel. That's what it made me think of. I don't care what he thought. He has nothing to do with this.
It's a thing.
It's a piece of art, and it's my interpretation of it, and all that is just extra. So if we look at this book that way, you can't help but think it's about all the things you and I were talking about earlier. There is a lot to be said about environmentalism and how you view and respect nature. There's a lot to be said about the obligations you have to the people around you. There's a lot to be said by selfless giving generosity, right, tons of that stuff to
be said. But when we bring the author back into it, which is kind of what you're getting at, we bring this clansman, this segregation is clansman author back into it, and you're like, well, what was it all about.
There's three takes.
One is my wife's idea. I'm gonna tell it to you, and I'm gonna leave it hanging. One take is that he changed, he was wrong. This is his apology, right. One take is that he didn't change at all. And he is a something of an anarchist. He despises the US government, he despises Catholicism, has a real ax to grind with organized religion, doesn't like the education system. He's
an anarchist. When I recently emailed with the teacher that taught it, he pointed out, there's a lot to be found in here around things that you might consider that don't tread on me. Movement, anything organized, anything establishment should be torn down. Okay, maybe that's what he meant. But if that's what he meant, and this is a clan text, there's some parts that are really hard to get your head around. One of the first things that happens in the book is there they get on a bus, the
grandfather gets the boy. They get on a bus. The opening scene, they step onto a bus and the bus driver. Keep in mind this is in the seventies, and we're talking of about a bus. Okay, people getting on buses and rolls of parks and the civil rights movement and how you're seated on a bus, what you're interacting actions with the person driving the bus is in here. Little
Tree and his grandfather get on the bus. The bus driver makes a joke to everybody on the bus and says how, and everybody on the bus high a big, loud, sarcastic Cherokee greeting of how directed towards the people on the bus, who all laugh at the Indians and makes them feel very awkward to pay and makes it painful for them to count out and pay the bus fare. And that's like some load that's loaded. And it's not
about whites, it's about the treatment of Indians. What's more, there's a part in the book where Grandpa is relating a story that happens to his father and his father had it's like a parable about the reconstruction souve and in it union soldiers, Union soldiers kill a black man. It is like, when you look at it, like stepping like never minding the death of the author thing and just taking education a little tree as this thing, which is very hard, admittedly very hard to do, knowing what
we know about the individual that wrote it. And it's a clan thing, it's a segregationist thing. It's very complicated. If that's the case. My professor that I emailed with, he pointed out, if you do look at it as political rhetoric, he's not preaching to the choir right. He's taking people from the environmental movement. He's taking people who feel Native Americans were brutalized by the US federal government. He's drawing an audience here.
This was on.
Oprah prior to the revelation about the author. This was on like this sort of like formalized booklist library shelf of Oprah Winfrey.
In the early nineties.
Okay, is it so like seditious that it's taking an audience of the environmental movement back to the landers, hippies, people who sympathize with the Native American movement in the seventies. He's introducing them to anti establishment. He's introducing them to the idea that their government is evil. Like, is he that shrewd? Can I do the third one?
Yeah?
My wife's like, maybe he's schizophrenic. Did you know in real life he at one point in time had his kids stop acting like he was their father. He wanted them to treat him as though he was their uncle. He died in complications of getting into a big fight, physical fight with his kid. You look at the bio and you see that there's a person who struggled with mental illness.
Yeah.
Maybe we're trying to go like, well, maybe he meant this. Maybe you know, we're playing checkers and he's playing chess. Yeah right, Maybe he was just straight up crazy. Maybe he's nuts, he's schizophrenic, he doesn't know what he thinks, he can't hold his family life together. He's like, and he's not the first insane person to be a great writer at all.
Yeah, man, I guess this brings up the question of what is the definition of being crazy? At an external level? This guy was incredibly intact. However, we know that he craved attention the limelight. He was an incredibly good liar, but maybe his motivations were much more simple. I asked Dan the same thing, Steve and got an interesting answer. So here's here's the big question. This is the reason I came to North Carolina. Why did Asa Carter write this book?
That's a simple that's a simple answer. Asa Carter became disillusioned with politics, and not only did he realize that he was losing the battle against integration, but he realized his brand of politics was never gonna, never gonna fly. He made a very conscious decision, he told I interviewed his lawyer and he said, you know, I'm gonna make some money. I've struggled a lot, and he had he had good page bad periods, but he said, I'm gonna make some money. I'm gonna be the next Hemingway. Well
he wasn't the next Heimyway. But ambitions, yeah, it always had ambitions. And so he had really clearly in his mind the outlaw Josey Wales that grew out of his research and writing about Jesse and Frank James, because he saw them as a Confederate heroes, because you know, they were marauders and then became outlaws and saw and he tried to claim they weren't outlays. So I understood that about the Outlaw Josey Wales and the second Book. But the Indian thing, it was only as I began to dig
into it that I really began to understand. He was drawn to Indians and cowboys for a lot of reasons, but Indians in particular because he saw Native Americans their struggle to maintain their way of life against a vicious and murderous national government army as analogous to his struggle to maintain white Southern culture. And in some ways, it was much safer to write about Indians being oppressed than white Southerners being oppressed.
Now would that did he?
Do you think he actually thought that that would translate to people, because that wouldn't.
Be no no, But to him, it's just deep some need somebody.
And I don't I don't think he thought most people would see it that way. The other thing is he was always attracted to the whole story of Native Americans, and I think it was part of that generational thing, you know, and that that is true that Americans became much more attracted to Native Americans.
Once they were gone.
They were gone. It was just like this mythical thing that they were. He somehow grasped that at a very early age. I was reading this interview. I mean I thought of it as something growing out of the sixties or seventies, and Fred Berger the sky that I'm really indebted to. He died suddenly of a heart attack, but
he had interviewed a lot of people. But he interviewed one of his shipmates, a guy named Gordon Lackey, who was closest friend when he was in the Navy in World War Two, And it turned out he told the whole story of Little Tree when he was eighteen years old.
Just as a it's a story.
He just said, I grew up with my grandpa was a Cherokee America, and he told the story of.
Little Tree as if it was him, Like, yeah.
Yeah, he lied to this guy and a Lacke said, when Fred interviewed him, he said, you know, I thought maybe he was a bullsher but he said then most of us were in the Navy, you know, when we talked to each other. But it was fascinating to me that it age eighteen, he already had the basic outlines of that story, and it was just waiting. And he didn't begin writing that until later. But his earlier stuff
he began writing. He had piles of manuscripts. His friend said, back in the nineteen fifties and sixties he was writing. So he was always he wanted to be a novelist. It was just this break when he decided to break from his political pass that it gave him an opportunity to become that writer.
That's interesting, But I have a bigger question for Dan.
So when you have a story like this, someone writes something later in their life, Like we know that George Wallace would later ask for forgiveness for a lot of the stuff that he did and go on this reconciliation tour and do all this stuff. Some people would read into him writing this empathetic book towards Native Americans and say that he was just a changed man. In the book, you say that he maintained being a racist his whole life. Now, how do we know that?
Well, he had several friends in Texas who did not know who who was. They knew him as Forrest Carter. One of them was a woman named Louise Green, who had been a radio television personality there and it was a really interesting woman. I interviewed her at some length. She was very close to Carter. She came to terms with the fact that he was not who he said.
He was after his death.
After his death, I was the one that told her he was well. Yeah, And she said, what broke my heart about him was that in many ways he was a fascinating individual and she loved to be with him. I mean, he was just a great person to be around when he was in the forest. Carter personaep But she said, what what happen with By this time, the time she knew he was struggling with alcohol and what would happened was when he got drunk out it would come. And the last time she saw him was very shortly
before his death. They went out to dinner in Abilene and she was worried because he was drinking too much. And this black couple came in and he started raging about he wasn't going to eat where a bunch of using the N word, and went on and onwn and own, and she kept trying to get him to stop. She said, you know, not only is it not the way I feel, I live here and I'm here. You're saying all this loudly so everybody can see it, and people will think
I believe this, And he wouldn't. She said, he wouldn't stop, and she got up and left, and that was the last time she saw him alive. Well, And it was just to her it was heartbreaking because it was to her it was an individual who had such incredible skills as a writer, but also this personality which would have allowed him, as she said, to do such great things, and yet something went awry at a very young age that sent him this way.
Do you think that he would be classified as some type of mental illness today, schizophrenia or bipolar or something.
I don't think it would. It'd be hard to classify it. It's a kind of fanaticism we see in a lot of people. It is interesting to me that his sister, who loved him very much but who totally disagreed with him. She was chief of psychiatric nurses at the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital, and she loved her brother. But she sat down with him on one occasion and tried to persuade him to see somebody for psychiatric help. And he never spoke to a game, he just cut himself off completely.
So whether it was mental illness or a diagnosable mental illness, it clearly was a kind of compulsion and the kind of fanaticism that went to the very core of who he was. And the interviews with his nephew and her niece were most useful because they spent a lot of time with him and they talked about how he could be.
It could be wonderful, He funny. He would play the guitar with his brother and sister in law and they would sing songs, and he'd tell stories, and then something would like a switch would go off, and he would particularly if you crossed him and you contradicted him, and he would become furious then And as both of both his niece and his nephew said, he could be scared. As Forrest Carter lived a life of drama and violence, his death was even more so. For years, we knew
that there were suspicious circumstances. I mean, this was common knowledge at the time that he died. In the official autopsy showed that he died of being unable to regurgitate food he choked to death on him. But there were also rumors that something terrible had happened at his son's home,
but no one could tell exactly what happened. And in nineteen ninety one, I'm not to do my own horn here, but I went out to Avlene and I met Judge Samuel Matta, and I told him what I was interested in and written him ahead of time, and he got the sealed police report out and which had been sealed since no charges wherever bought, and he found away from me to get access to it even though it was sealed.
I had to read the book to find out.
And if you want to find out this, uh his death, which as I said, certainly has kind of biblical overtones, just read the story of Cannon Abel you read the book.
Well, I am just an old rebel reckon, that is all I am. For this carpet bag of government. I do not give a dad blame. I'm glad I fit again it I'll keep fighting.
Till we won.
And I don't want no pardon for nothing that I've done. No, I don't want no pardon for what I was nor what I am. And I won't be reconstructed and I don't give a dad blame. This is a Sokarta may God bless you, and I thank you for listen.
Doctor Dan T.
Carter's book Unmasking the Klansmen was published in April twenty twenty three. You can find it on Amazon and just about anywhere books are sold. I can't thank you enough for listening to bear Grease. Be sure to listen to the undercover agent who's been assigned to play the long game on me, Brent Reeves and his new podcast, This Country Life.
It's on the bear Grease feed.
And one day, when I'm busted for crimes I've never committed, it'll make a great story. In the meantime, check out This Country Life, released every Friday on the bear Grease podcast feed, and be sure to check out First Light's new trace pant and jacket system for lightweight, breathable hunting gear for the South.
I look forward to talking to all the folks on the bear Grease Render next week. Talk to you soon.