Willis Carto: AFP Tribute

“Champion of free speech and honest news passes away at 89 after monumental career…”

Long at the forefront of the nationalist movement in the United States and the historical Revisionist movement both in the U.S. and worldwide, Willis Allison Carto was born on July 17, 1926, in Fort Wayne, Ind. He was raised in Ohio, where the young Carto developed an early interest in journalism.

After graduation from high school in 1944, he went into the Army.  In his own retrospective words, Carto’s efforts in the military were “to fight for the glorious democracy of my country, the survival of Soviet communism, a third and fourth term for Roosevelt, a chance to kill Germans by the thousands as desired by Churchill, Eisenhower and the Zionists, part of Palestine for them as a bonus, vast riches for the bankers and war suppliers, coffin makers and flag makers.”

He earned a Purple Heart after he received a memento from a Japanese infantryman on Cebu Island in the Philippines on May 5, 1945.

In 1953, with Aldrich Blake, he founded Liberty & Property, Inc. and published the first edition, and seven more followed, of the First National Directory of Rightist” Groups and Organizations in the United States and Some Foreign Countries. From 1955 until 1960, under the venue of Liberty and Property, Carto published Right, a monthly newsletter that. pioneered new thinking within the historic America First movement.

From 1954 to 1958 Carto was active in Congress of Freedom, serving as its secretary and as a member of the board of directors.  This was one of a variety of grassroots populist and nationalist organizations that Carto cooperated with in the earliest days of his career. 

Also in 1955, Carto laid the groundwork for the establishment of Liberty Lobby, the Washington, D.C.-based populist institution, when he established the lobby’s research department in the nation’s capital.

In 1956, Carto confounded the increasingly influential liberal-internationalist wing of the Republican Party when he established a Conservative Republican Headquarters at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, from which he distributed some 100,000 pieces of literature, including, most notably, a controversial and provocative circular entitled “Ike Renominated in Spite of His Red Record.”

From 1957 through 1961, Carto was a member of the national advisory board of We, The People.

In 1960, with Liberty Lobby now operating on a full-time basis in Washington, Carto launched publication of Liberty Lobby’s official newsletter, Liberty Letter.

Col. Curtis B. Dall, the former son-in-law of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and an outspoken critic of FDR’s policies), signed on as chairman of Liberty Lobby’s Board of Policy, the populist institution’s formal membership organization….

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