MADOLE, JAMES H.
American occultist and fascist, 1927–79. The forefather of American fascist occultism, James Hartung Madole was born in New York City and spent most of his life there. An avid reader of science fiction, he gravitated toward the fascist wing of the science fiction fan community in the 1940s. At the age of 18, Madole founded the Animist Party, a radical right-wing political movement drawing most of its support from among science fiction fans. When Kurt Mertig, a veteran pro-Nazi organizer, founded the National Renaissance Party (NRP) in 1949, he recruited Madole and shortly thereafter made him the NRP’s leader, a position Madole held until his death 30 years later.
Madole began his career as a Nazi enthusiast, copying Hitler’s hatred of communism and alliance with capitalist interests, but during the 1950s he pioneered the central theme of neo-Nazi economic theory worldwide, a “Third Way” rejecting both communism and capitalism in favor of a “corporate state” modeled on Mussolini’s Italy that rejected class warfare and economic competition alike. His contributions to neo-Nazi ideology were at least as creative. Like many in his generation, he encountered the spiritual teachings of the Theosophical Society by way of popular adventure stories (such as Robert Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” series) that used Theosophy’s mythic history as background. See Theosophical Society.
Madole borrowed much of Theosophy, combined it with Nazi antisemitism and homegrown American racism, and added dollops of science fiction and popular occult literature to create his own brand of fascist occultism. In his major treatise on the subject, The New Atlantis: A Program for an Aryan Garden of Eden in North America, he proposed a social order dominated by a strict caste system and racial segregation, centered on the quest to produce the God-Man, a new human species produced by “selective breeding, cosmic thinking, specialized training and Occult Initiation” (cited in Goodrick-Clarke 2002, p. 82). He despised Christianity as a Jewish invention and had close contacts with the Church of Satan and other Satanist groups. See Church of Satan; Satanism.
Despite his exotic ideology and odd appearance – when speaking in public, he always wore three-button suits with all three buttons fastened, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a white motorcycle helmet – Madole attracted a modest following. In public appearances he was always surrounded by members of the Security Echelon (SE), the NRP’s storm troopers, who wore black and gray uniforms and served as security guards and brawlers in the street battles that frequently surrounded Madole’s speeches. Consciously modeled after Hitler’s SS, the SE combined a paramilitary ethos with occult training and the study of metaphysics. See SS (Schutzstaffel).
Madole died of cancer in 1979, and his party collapsed shortly thereafter. While the NRP was never a secret society, Madole’s career played a crucial role in launching fascist occultism in postwar America and spreading ideas central to the neo-Nazi secret societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. See neo-Nazi secret societies.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006