Long, long ago, in the days of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, there was a storybook neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, called Dominion Hills. It was a prosperous place – quiet, middle class, very respectable and lily white. The people who lived there all either worked for the one of the many federal government agencies, served in the military, or they were the sort of professionals whom one would expect in such a suburb of a place like Washington DC – doctors, dentists, police detectives, fire chiefs, orthodontists, pharmacists, managers of the Magruder’s grocery, Meenehan’s Hardware, or the Montgomery Ward at Seven Corners. Nice people, right out of a storybook about the American dream, circa 1958.
And right there, in the heart of Dominion Hills, near the intersection of Wilson Boulevard and Patrick Henry Drive, stood the barracks of the American Nazi Party, aka the National Socialist White People’s Party. The headquarters was elsewhere in Arlington, further up Wilson Boulevard toward the city, down the hill and over the Washington & Old Dominion railroad tracks, in a place called Parkington at the intersection of Wilson and Glebe Road. The leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, had offices there, but being a good fascist leader, he bunked at the barracks with his men.
It was a forbidding place, indeed. “WARNING!” signs posted at the long driveway leading into the dense woods that obscured the entire compound from view by anyone on Wilson Boulevard, “NO TRESPASSING! SURVIVORS WILL BE PROSECUTED!” From the depths of that dark redoubt, fenced flatbed trucks packed with young white men in storm trooper uniforms, brown buses with blocked windows and mysterious black sedans drove in and out.
Periodically, the American Nazi Party would grace Dominion Hills with a flurry of its propaganda leaflets, this being the era of flyers and mimeograph machines, not smart phones and social media. The good citizens of Dominion Hills would arise some random Tuesday morning to find their porches and windshields decorated with the Party’s latest policy statements and public service announcements. These were not subtle, by any means – “Jews will not replace us!” “Left wing Communist sympathizers are corrupting our youth!” “Foreign sub-humans are poisoning the blood of our nation!” And, of course, there were graphics, often featuring nasty caricatures of Black people in general and specific illustrations of the uncontrollable jungle lust Black men supposedly harbor for White American Womanhood. And that was the mild stuff, actually. There’s no way any literal quotations or descriptions of the really nasty content, of which there was plenty, is making its way into this Web log. That will have to be left to the imagination, although, if some of those things mentioned already sound familiar, well, perhaps imagining that other material won’t be too difficult.
Yes, the American Nazi Party was a true presence in Dominion Hills. But even in Eisenhower’s America, there was the First Amendment, and the good citizens of Dominion Hills respected the local Nazis’ right to be wrong and say so in public, even with tiny screeds tucked under the windshield wipers of the Buick Roadmasters, Ford Fairlanes, Chrysler Imperials and Cadillac DeVilles parked in their driveways. So they gathered up those obscene ancestors of the tweets on Elon Musk’s X, threw them in the trash, and drove off to work, each and every Leave-to-Beaver, Ozzie-and-Harriet, Father-Knows-Best one of them, and never gave their Nazi neighbors a second thought.
Now, across Wilson Boulevard from the Nazi barracks was an undeveloped tract of land, originally intended as, and awaiting zoning permits for, space to build more cozy Dominion Hills homes. Entrepreneurial developers, however, had other ideas for it, and so Dominion Hills became abuzz with the Seven-Eleven controversy. The concept of a strip mall was decades in the future, of course, and nobody called it that then, but that was the idea: a row of shops facing Wilson Boulevard, anchored by a Seven-Eleven at the intersection of Wilson and Livingston Street. Some folks, mostly from city backgrounds, thought it was high time they could be able walk to a corner store for a pack of Camels or a quart of milk, while others, from more rural backgrounds, mostly, predicted the downfall of Western Civilization if that evil Seven-Eleven and its little string of accomplices – sub shop, TV repair, auto parts store, laundromat and the rest – were allowed to take root in idyllic, innocent Dominion Hills.
Well, Progress, and most likely some under-the-table incentives with the Arlington Zoning Board, won out, and the Seven-Eleven, along with its string of little storefront shops, was built. And there it stood for a number of years, providing a little convenience as well as little trashy ambience to that stretch of Wilson Boulevard in front of the Nazi barracks.
Then, on the afternoon of August 25, 1967, George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi party, bought a Slurpee at that Seven-Eleven and took his dirty socks and underwear to the laundromat in that little strip mall. And sometime shortly after he loaded the washer, shoved a quarter in and sat down to drink his Slurpee, one of his followers, John Patler, walked in and shot at him. He did not hit George Lincoln Rockwell’s toe. He did not graze George Lincoln Rockwell’s fingertip. He did not shoot off the end of George Lincoln Rockwell’s nose. He did not nick George Lincoln Rockwell’s ear. John Patler blew George Lincoln Rockwell’s brains out.
If he had had time to consider his fate, George Lincoln Rockwell would no doubt have been profoundly disappointed. Surely, he would have preferred to have been assassinated at a rally addressing a throng of supporters, cheering and laughing at his clever insults, right-wing insider jokes and racist dog-whistles, roaring approval at his attacks on communist sympathizers, national blood poisoning foreigners, left-wing sex perverts, dark skinned rapists and liberal Jewish conspiracies, and applauding wildly as he dropped dark hints exhorting his followers to political violence aimed at instituting a fascist dictatorship in the United States. But no, alas, George Lincoln Rockwell went all alone in that dinky Wilson Boulevard laundromat, washing the tire tracks out of his swastika-print boxers, which many folks in Dominion Hills opine was exactly the appropriate way for someone like him to die. And nobody in Dominion Hills was sorry to see him, and eventually, the American Nazi Party, disappear from the Nazi barracks on Wilson Boulevard, the Nazi headquarters in Parkington, and Arlington County in general.
Because back then, best beloved, there was the First Amendment, and everybody in Dominion Hills knew that bloviating, lying, bigoted lunatics like George Lincoln Rockwell had just as much right to say what they wanted to say as anybody. And furthermore, and most of all – and this is the moral of our story, best beloved – they knew that anyone with the common sense God gave a picnic ant could just simply ignore them, and when dealing with the likes of George Lincoln Rockwell, that was the best thing a person could do.
And so ends our fable. It’s 2024. The Nazi barracks are now Upton Hill Regional Park. The site of Nazi headquarters is occupied by a high-rise hotel-office building, the W&OD railroad is a bike path, and Parkington has been rechristened as Ballston. And for some strange reason or another, America has forgotten how to ignore demented abominations like George Lincoln Rockwell. Today, Americans either want to follow such pathetic examples of humanity around, fawning like Squeaky Fromme over Charles Manson, or they shout frantically from the rooftops to anyone who will listen about how dangerous and evil that guy is. Ignore blithering, ignorant, prejudiced, hate-filled, xenophobic fabulist wannabe dictators? Hell no! Today, one way or another, Americans are absolutely obsessed with them. Which goes to show, best beloved, as Mark Twain once observed, that while history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, it certainly does tend to rhyme.