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Title: 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 by Elinor Langer ISBN: 0-8050-5098-1 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 02 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Better Draft than Book
Comment: I was very unimpressed with this book. Elinor Langer simply does not strike me as a particularly good writer, and at times her prose was positively painful to read. Furthermore, she seems to have a great deal of difficulty picking a narrative voice, style, or perspective, and sticking with them. This may be related to the fact that most of her book seems to suffer from a similar affliction of not quite knowing what it's supposed to be: is it an account of the killing itself; a biography of the principal players; historical background on the White racist movement in America; or a critique of the way the police investigation and the Southern Poverty Law Center tried to tie other White Racists to the three skinheads? Langer seems incapable of choosing a focus; and the book- and reader- suffers as a result. It reads as chaotic, uneven, and more like a decent first draft rather than a polished, finished product.
Obviously, historical and biographical background are integral to understanding the personalities and motivations of the people involved in this story, and these sketches make up some of the more interesting sections in the book, but Langer doesn't seem to know when enough is enough. Instead of limiting herself to say, describing the Ethiopians, skinheads, and a few others, she instead tries to give us the "life story" of nearly anyone even remotely connected to the case- including many figures on the racist, radical right that had nothing to do with it at all. This is all the more bizarre because the main premise of Langer's book is that the death of Ethiopian Mulugeta Seraw was not racially motivated, and that therefore, the subsequent lawsuit against White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger (on the grounds that he was partially responsible for the man's death) was unfair and unjust. Essentially, Langer tries to paint the three men involved in the killing as having been marginal skinheads at best, or "social skinheads". But if that's the case- and there's certainly some evidence to support it- why go into so much historical detail about "the movement"?
Langer also seems to have the problem of being, at times, too close to the subject matter. Because she is a Portland-based author and was living here during the years leading up to the incident and arrests, and then through the subsequent media coverage and police investigations, she seems to feel as if she almost has a responsibility to share what her feelings were at the time. Were she a better author, this could work. As it is, though, her (mercifully) occasional personal musings just serve to further interrupt an already excessively choppy narrative. At one point, she goes so far as to detail all the reasons why it would be so difficult to reconstruct the "Portland punk scene" of the 1980s- and then proceeds to try, anyway, with very mixed results.
The book is not without its good points. Langer does a very good job of raising some important points, including the quandary of how informing the public about racist groups generates free publicity for them, as well as pointing out (albeit unconsciously) how, whether one is a lawyer, police officer, reporter, or white supremacist, there is always an element of extra-factual "art" involved with selling or presenting an idea or story to the public. I also enjoyed the description of Portland's racial and cultural histories. Also, as stated earlier, Langer is particularly adept at biography, and her descriptions of the three skinheads and Tom Metzger are quite fascinating, although there, once again, her work is marred by her preference for abruptly tangential sentences and unnecessary hyperbole.
It's also interesting that while it's clear she at least attempts to give everyone in the story a fair shake; her descriptions of Metzger come off as being somewhat overly sympathetic, verging on the affectionate, in sharp contrast to, for instance, the Portland community as a whole, or members of the legal system, whom she sharply dismisses with a few lines. Langer does a good job of pointing out how the media and community leaders were quick to paint the incident as the "(good) Ethiopians" versus the "(bad) Skinheads", but it is unclear if, in trying to point out this bias, she does not fall into a similar trap. Nowhere is this discrepancy better illustrated than when contrasting her depictions of Tom Metzger and Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Any faults Metzger has are chalked up to "mere" ideology; he is portrayed as a friendly, devoted family man, dedicated to "his cause". Dees is painted as a distrustful, selfish, "corporate" lawyer, characterized by a "whatever-it-takes-to-win attitude". While Langer seems to want to like Metzger in spite of his flaws, she seems incapable of seeing Dees as being anything but his flaws.
This is not to say that Langer's criticisms of Dees or the SPLC are necessarily unfounded; just that she does not seem to be terribly objective or even-handed in her descriptions and subsequent characterizations. Nor, more interestingly, does she seem to even be aware of this palpable bias.
In short, I believe I may understand what Langer was trying to do in this book, but remain unconvinced that she does it well.
Rating: 5
Summary: the action-the reaction
Comment: I am not going to make this a lengthy review but I do have to say that I found this book terribly interesting and extremely compelling. While I am fully aware of hate groups, it was not really until I read this book that I really thought about such groups. While I was saddened to read about the death of the Ethiopian man in the book, I was equally saddened to read the second part of the book and the travesty of the court proceedings. This book kept me reading... at stoplights, while cooking, and other places I shall not mention-lol. I also found myself checking out information on the web about hate groups and was disturbed to see how many hate groups-both mainstays and splinter groups there really are out there. I slightly agree with a previous reviewer that there are many other hate groups that deserve equal attention and may actually be a bigger threat to society as a whole than the skinhead movement.
What I found interesting in the book was that the author spent some time making the reader feel sorry for the victim for the injustice done to him by the skinheads, but in the second part of the book made the reader feel slightly sorry for the skinheads for the injustices in the trial(s). Overall, this book was excellent and worth reading.
Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful, insightful and accurate
Comment: Eloquent, brilliant, insightful and fair, Elinor Langer's A Hundred Little Hitlers, published by Metropolitan Books is the true story of what really happened in Portland, Oregon on November 13, 1988 when three racist skinheads fought with three Ethiopians -- and one of the Ethiopians was beaten to death with a baseball bat.
I was a police officer on the Portland Police Bureau when this murder happened, working crime analysis at the downtown precinct, a job that included monitoring the growing number of racist and non-racist skinheads in the city. After the murder, the skinhead population and their crimes escalated as in no other city, so I was sent to the Gang Enforcement Team where I could monitor skins and investigate their crimes. I spent four years focusing on them, including working as a bodyguard for Tom Metzger during the two-week civil trial, which is covered so well in A Hundred Little Hitlers.
Though I was "the skinhead expert" and Public Information Officer for everything that was skinhead related, Langer's painstaking research and powerful, compelling writing kept me turning the pages, mumbling at least a hundred times, "I didn't know that."
This book is more than just a gripping tale of murder. Langer includes the history of the white supremacy movement; history of the various players; the politics in the movement, in the justice system and in the city; police procedure; and courtroom drama, all told from the standpoint of scholarly research, and profound analysis and conclusions. She shows great bravery as she paints a picture that isn't always politically correct in the delicate world of race relations. But she does so with truth, which wasn't always the case during this period (and still isn't today).
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, black gangs were shooting up neighborhoods virtually every night, Southeast Asian gangs were terrorizing their own community with high-tech, automatic weapons, and Hispanic gangs were killing each other and spraying innocent neighborhoods with bullets. Some of this made the news, but much of it didn't. But should a skinhead draw a swastika on a wall, it led at 5 o'clock.
I tried for two years to get a reporter to do a story that showed how black gangs often perpetrated more racially motivated crimes than skinheads. Finally, one reporter had the guts. The camera showed me holding 24 police reports of black on white crimes, but only six reports depicting skinhead crimes against minorities in the same four-week period. The next day, the reporter got in trouble at his TV station, and I was ordered by the chief's office to never, ever, do that again. The truth was not politically correct.
Langer doesn't mention this specifically, but she does discuss how the relationships between whites and blacks in Portland "required immediate vengeance for the death." She discusses how the police produced a politically acceptable case to the DA, rather than digging deeper into the facts of what really occurred the night of the murder. She talks about how the Justice Department had elicited the "racial motivation" plea bargain, which was the platform for all that followed. And she asks what would have happened if Tom Metzger had not been the "white supremacist of the hour," if Morris Dees had not had his "agency" theory all ready for his next target, and if the three skinheads had gone to trial and all the facts, the truth, had been brought out.
This is an incredible, courageous writing achievement, a definitive work about a murder, about hate, about our justice system, and about morals.
From a guy who was there, I highly recommend A Hundred Little Hitlers.
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