Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew

Author:Kathleen Belew [Belew, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Military, Vietnam War, Social Science, Discrimination & Race Relations, Veterans, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism
ISBN: 9780674286078
Google: cCxQDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0674286073
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Her testimony positioned her as endangered. It placed her in peril and in the presence of male racial others—the “Mexican boy” feeding her with “his dirty fingers,” and the officers. It presented men of color “caress[ing] their weapons” as they “leer[ed]” at her, invoking masturbation.79 It also placed her in a violated bedroom space, “chained to the bed, which had a filthy, rotten mattress.” Within the broader frame of pro-natalism, this language positioned Sheila Beam’s body as vulnerable to attack by men of color, and emphasized it as a site of combat where battles might be won or lost through the birth or absence of white children. The vaginal bleeding she said she suffered after her imprisonment hinted at both rape and miscarriage of a white child, and would have signified a double martyrdom.

Jailed at the moment when the state had finally turned to the prosecution of the white power movement, Sheila Beam acted the martyr in a way that further united activists and appealed to people beyond the movement. Her wounded body served as a constant symbolic reminder of state failure and betrayal. Metzger lobbied for her release; Kirk Lyons, who represented Beam in the sedition trial and would become the go-to attorney of the white power movement over the next decade, sent an associate, Dave Holloway, to help the Toohey family advocate for her return. Back home, the Tooheys answered the phone with the entreaty, “Save Our Sheila.”80 After her release Lyons told one reporter, “It made a Christian out of me again. Her being freed was a miracle to me.”81

In the mainstream press, too, Sheila Beam became a sympathetic figure in local newspapers and major publications alike. A series of articles in the Galveston Daily News focused on her injuries, stating as fact that she had been “severely beaten” and raising the possibility that she “may have been sexually assaulted.” The same reporter uncritically repeated white power claims that FBI agents had refused to arrange her release to the United States, and described “physical and psychological coercion” during her ten-day imprisonment.82 Other articles linked her faith in God to her hopes for the acquittal of all the trial’s defendants,83 and mentioned her pain and injuries with no mention of the reasons for Louis Beam’s arrest or Sheila Beam’s actions in shooting and wounding the officer.84 The Houston Chronicle reported that she returned to the United States sobbing and limping, escorted by her father and an associate of Lyons, and was met by her mother and three brothers at the airport. The article emphasized that Sheila Beam had a swollen abdomen and walked with such a pronounced limp that two people had to support her.85 A photograph of Sheila’s return in the Miami News featured a flattering photograph of her leaning against her brother’s chest, holding flowers and flanked by a pretty, smiling, female friend. The caption referred to her “break[ing] out in tears” upon her return, and to her being “charged with shooting a Mexican federal police officer during the arrest of her husband at their … home.

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