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| “ | White man unite, white man fight. | „ |
| ~ The NRP's slogan. |
The National Renaissance Party (NRP) was an American neo-fascist group founded in 1949 by James Hartung Madole. It was frequently in the headlines during the 1960s and 1970s for its involvement in violent protests and riots in New York City.
Background edit
The NRP was founded in January 1949 by James Madole through the merger of several earlier American fascist organizations. Its headquarters were in the Yorkville area of New York City.
The NRP was named for a phrase from the Last will and testament of Adolf Hitler, which stated that "I die with a happy heart aware [that there] will spring up...the seed of a radiant renaissance of the National Socialist movement."
By 1954, government investigators, although unable to determine the exact size of the party, estimated its membership to be between 200 and 700, although historian John George thought that NRP membership never exceeded 50 at any given time. The group also had an "elite Security Echelon," headed in the 1960s by United Klans of America member and Odinist Dan Burros (who was secretly Jewish), who killed himself on the same day in 1965 that his ethnicity was revealed by The New York Times.
By 1963 Madole was running the party out of his apartment at 10 West 90th Street. The NRP used a blue lightning bolt within a white circle on a field of red as its symbol. The "Elite Guard" (stormtroopers) wore gray and black uniforms with armbands featuring a lightning bolt within a circle.
The NRP's doctrines included standard elements of fascism, including white supremacy, anti-semitism, and opposition to democracy. The Party also endorsed standard racist ideas such as "the voluntary repatriation of the black man back to Africa" and the sterilization of black welfare recipients. It maintained ties with other neo-Nazi organizations, such as George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party, which occasionally supplied the NRP with fascist literature for distribution.
The NRP also maintained good relations with a number of far-out mystical groups, such as the Church of Satan, whose founder, Anton LaVey, was a personal friend of Madole's.
Members of the NRP were known to cause riots towards people and groups they disliked. Physical fights often ensued, and there are even some incidents of NRP's members using weapons such as guns, tear gas, nitric acid, and even a crossbow and steel-tipped arrows on one occasion. These particular incidents would often land members extended stays in jail.
Madole died of cancer in 1979. His mother Grace recruited Andrej Lisanik, a former Czech military officer in the World War II Czech army, to lead the party. Lisanik was killed by a mugger in 1980 and, as the bulk of the NRP membership details and party records were in his car when he was attacked, they were lost. Within a year the party was defunct.