Aryan Nations was a White-nationalist community founded on the Christian Identity movement which was based on the belief that people of Northern European ancestry are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites. The most prominent early figure in the movement was California minister Wesley A. Swift (1913-1970), who added the belief that people of color are subhuman and that Jews are descendants of Satan with inordinate power who want to destroy the White race.  Richard Girnt Butler (1918-2004) was an aeronautical engineer who was inspired by the caste system while working in India during WWII and hoped to import the idea to the United States. Later, while living in California, he began to attend Swift’s sermons and became active in the church, eventually taking over as leader upon Swift’s death in 1970. In 1973, he moved his congregation to a twenty-acre property near the town of Hayden Lake, Idaho, hoping that it would be the nucleus of a future “Aryan homeland” in the northwestern states. Some parishioners moved with Butler from California to Idaho, and he used various recruiting methods to enlarge the congregation, including offering land to local struggling farmers and conducting prison outreach. He constructed a bunkhouse where formerly incarcerated men could live in exchange for printing and distributing his literature, and a watchtower with armed guards after an unknown person bombed his church. Only four people lived permanently on the grounds, but there were normally other residents staying there for periods of time ranging from months to years, and people living outside of the compound attended regular Sunday services, Bible studies, and holiday celebrations. Members were expected to abstain from alcohol, drugs, swearing, and extra-marital sex. There were numerous collective projects such as home-schooling residents’ children, operating the printing press, and administering the prison ministry. Over the next few decades, the Aryan Nations compound served as a gathering place for the White-supremacist movement, as exemplified by the annual Aryan Youth Festival and the Aryan World Congress, attended by hundreds of members of various White-supremacist groups, such as the KKK, neo-Nazis, and skinheads throughout the 1980s. Butler referred to it as the “international headquarters of the White race.”  In the early 1980s the organization received public attention because of a series of bank robberies and a murder committed by a splinter group. The organization also faced increased resistance from locals in Cœur d’Alene; Kootenai County established a task force for human rights and residents would often protest the group’s activities. Aryan Nations was deteriorating by the late 1990s, however it met with a sudden, dramatic dénouement.  On July 1, 1998, two security guards assaulted Victoria Keenan, a local Native American woman, and her son on the road outside the compound. In a 2000 verdict, a district court found the organization negligent in the management of the guards and required it to pay $6.3 million to the victims. Butler declared bankruptcy and the compound was awarded to the Keenans. After leadership disputes following Butler’s death in 2004, Aryan Nations splintered into various factions.

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From the early-1970s arrival of Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, to the March 2020 Idaho House’s failed vote for a “Too Great for Hate” specialty license plate, the state of Idaho has in recent years struggled over both the presence and meaning of modern white supremacy within its borders. Shortly after moving to Idaho, Butler established an Aryan Nations headquarters in rural Kootenai County on a twenty-acre site just north of Coeur d’Alene. Butler used funding he had saved and donations from fellow worshippers to begin holding services for his own congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian, a group founded in the 1940s that promulgated white supremacy and antisemitism. Butler’s compound included an adjoined print shop for publishing books, fliers, posters, and pamphlets filled with racist propaganda and antisemitic caricatures. The group led parades that gathered large crowds of youths in downtown Coeur d’Alene alongside annual summits at the compound. In the mid-1990s, the Aryan Nations began running its own website, one of the first dedicated sites for recruiting white supremacists. The religious tenor of Butler’s compound was a major draw for many who saw him as a prophetic individual, and he claimed a religious freedom right to spread his message of hate. From this headquarters, Butler preached white supremacy and exclusion to his followers, making the area synonymous with white supremacy. However, many residents of Coeur d’Alene felt distressed at Butler’s growing presence. In 1981, Butler’s followers and rivals engaged in violent conflict, and someone defaced a local Jewish restaurant with antisemitic grafitti. This brought the compound and the town to the attention of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. The brainchild of local activists Tony Stewart, Norman Gissel, and Marshall Mend, the task force rallied locals to advocate against hate by using community outreach programs to speak against white supremacy and by intervening in disputes involving Butler and his supporters. The advocacy group finally made headway when they won a $6.3 million lawsuit against Butler’s group for violating local codes. Stewart, Gissel, and others involved in that campaign were loath to offer their strategy as a solution for other cities, but they say their approach might be one way to address white supremacy in the US and around the world. Bankrupted by the suit, the Aryan Nations lost possession of their local property. Idaho firefighters used the compound buildings for arson investigation training, eventually burning down every structure. The Carr Foundation later purchased the land and gifted it to the North Idaho College Foundation on the condition that they redevelop it into a “peace park.” However, in 2019 NICF obtained the Carr foundation’s permission to instead sell the land in a favorable market to fund an endowment for human rights education. The task force’s victory over the Aryan Nations does not mean the struggle against white supremacy has concluded. Coeur d’Alene remains a town of mixed emotions between those who allow racism to flourish and those who believe Idaho can be “too great for hate.”

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