Funding questioned Critics say some Defend Colorado money tainted
By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News July 15, 2006 Defend Colorado Now took in thousands of contributions, large and small, from earnest Coloradans concerned about the negative effects of illegal immigrants.
But critics of the state group are saying that its outside money came with a taint.
Its largest contributions have come from a national group whose longstanding campaigns for immigration cuts, border defense and official English have brought it some fringe and sometimes unwelcome bedfellows - racists.
It's a fact of life that hasn't escaped the principal outside donor, John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist and longtime environmentalist regarded by many as one of the progenitors of the immigration control movement.
One of Tanton's many organizations, U.S. Inc., in his upstate Michigan hometown of Petoskey, gave a total of $48,000 to Defend Colorado Now. That's 30 percent of the total of more than $161,000 the group collected in just over two years.
Frequently attacked by leftist critics as a hate organization, Tanton's empire of immigration groups attracts a wide diversity of supporters. He can't help it, he says, if some of them don't like minorities.
"One of the hazards of holding opinions is that there are always going to be some confused folks who share those views," Tanton wrote in a statement posted on the Web site of his Social Contract Press, publisher of numerous immigration pieces including some by authors who express white nationalist or separatist views.
"The fact that there may be some misguided people who want to cut immigration, however, does not mean it is an inherently bad idea, any more than Mussolini's getting Italian trains to run on schedule serves as an argument against well-run railroads," wrote Tanton, who didn't reply to a request from the Rocky Mountain News for an interview.
The controversy that has dogged Tanton came to Colorado last week when a Chicago anti-racist group, Center for New Community, issued a report on Defend Colorado Now. It laid out connections between the Colorado leaders, Fred Elbel and former governor Dick Lamm, with Tanton - and by extension, with Tanton's fellow travelers.
Defend Colorado Now's political mission, to get Initiative 55 onto November's ballot, failed when the Colorado Supreme Court last month stopped its petition drive cold. The justices ruled the initiative violated the single-subject rule for ballot measures.
But the failure led directly to Gov. Bill Owens calling the recently ended special session of the legislature to deal with immigration issues. In effect, Defend Colorado Now achieved some of what it was after.
"The 50,000 petition signatures we gathered made all this happen this year," Elbel said. "The voice of the people was heard."
As for efforts to link his movement with white nationalist and racists, Elbel writes it off as scare tactics.
"In my opinion, people who rely upon racial attacks demonstrate that they don't have a solid argument against reducing immigration numbers," he said.
Interest is environmental
Lamm also defended Tanton.
"I think the racism charge is bull----," said the former governor."The other side has cried racism so much I am so tired of that. John (Tanton) is one of the people who is pushing the envelope on certain subjects, but over my years with John, I have had no doubt that his primary motivation is environmental."
Tanton's history indeed shows that he came to his hard-line position on immigration from decades of involvement in the environmental movement, particularly the Sierra Club.
He has known Lamm for nearly 40 years, and he followed Lamm as national president of Zero Population Growth in 1975.
Tanton, 72, has been a Sierra Club member since the late 1960s and held several local and national positions. His unsuccessful efforts to get the Sierra Club to see immigration and population growth as one of the leading threats to the environment led him to form the Federation for American Immigration Reform - FAIR - in 1979.
Starting there, he went on to form or spin off numerous related organizations, including those that push official English policies as well as immigration controls.
One group he helped to form is WITAN, from an Old English term, witenagemot, or a council of wise men. Its periodic meetings have included Jared Taylor of the New Century Foundation and its white nationalist American Renaissance magazine. The current featured offer on American Renaissance's Web site is a report called "The Color of Crime" highlighting higher crime rates among blacks and discounting racial bias over inherent cultural traits as a reason.
Lamm said he is uncomfortable with Taylor's philosophy but doesn't see a direct connection between Tanton and Taylor aside from attendance at some of the same events.
"I know who Jared Taylor is," said Lamm, who in the 1960s was a civil rights attorney for Colorado's anti-discrimination commission, and who was a founding member and first vice president of the NAACP chapter at Berkeley.
"If there's an association there with Jared Taylor, if I were John, I'd disavow it," Lamm said.
Comments seen as racist
In a memo to WITAN meeting attendees in 1986 aimed at fostering discussion, Tanton made a number of remarks that critics took as racist.
One example: "As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night?"
And, "Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!"
Disclosure of the private memo was embarrassing enough to convince allies Walter Cronkite and Linda Chavez to resign from Tanton's U.S. English group.
Tanton's far-flung interests also remain strongly in the environmental camp, as well as purely local concerns. He helps to fund an effort to lessen artificial lighting at night; research into birds of prey in the Great Lakes region; to promote grazing native animals on dry lands in the western U.S. and east Africa; and to install a statue to martyred Irish patriot Robert Emmet in Petoskey, which is in Emmet County.
But the focus of immigration control advocates inevitably settles into a discussion of culture - primarily America's white European culture and the threat that Third World immigration poses from the standpoints of crime, the economy and even religion.
Anti-Catholicism is a strong strain in the immigration control movement because of the Catholic Church's liberal position on increased immigration, particularly from Latin America.
Brenda Walker, a Sierra Club associate of Elbel's who joined in unsuccessful effort to elect immigration control candidates including Lamm to the club's board of directors in 2004, had harsh words on her blog on a white nationalist Web site, VDare. Her claim is that the church needs Latino immigrants who are more passive and unquestioning.
"Apparently, as good authoritarians, the Catholic hierarchy prefers passively obedient parishioners -rather than educated Americans who are capable of critical analysis," Walker wrote. "Credulous Mexicans fresh from the pueblo are seen as ideal fillers of pews."
VDare is named for the first white child born in North America, Virginia Dare of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina. The site is run by immigration critic and author Peter Brimelow - himself an immigrant to America from Great Britain. His works have been published or distributed by Tanton's Social Contract Press.
Another of Social Contract's frequent contributors was the late Sam Francis. In a speech that got him fired as a columnist from the Washington Times, Francis opined that western civilization couldn't have developed except for the genetic traits of the white race - and that western values couldn't be passed to other races.
He said the election of Barack Obama of Illinois to the U.S. Senate would be "the moment when America. . . is transformed into the non-white multiracial empire symbolized and led by 'people like Obama.' "
Ties close to home
But the closest ties between Tanton and the white nationalist and segregationist movements is in his own office complex in Petoskey.
Wayne Lutton is editor of Social Contract Press. A widely published author and intellectual on matters of immigration and culture, Lutton co-authored with Tanton in 1994 a widely read book on the issue titled The Immigration Invasion.
In a display of the strange brew of interests attracted to the book's point of view, the foreword was written by the late liberal senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, and the book was favorably reviewed on the Web site of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
But Lutton has been directly involved with white nationalists such as Taylor. Lutton has been a speaker at an American Renaissance meeting and is involved with the parent organization, New Century Foundation.
Lutton has also been on the advisory board of the publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens Councils, which fought desegregation in the south in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1999, then Republican National Chairman Jim Nicholson, of Colorado, branded the group as racist and called on any Republicans who belonged to it to quit.
Lutton also has written articles for the Journal of Historical Review, published by the Holocaust-denial group Institute for Historical Review. Lutton's articles haven't dealt with Holocaust denial, but with other World War II issues.
Lutton deflected questions about his racial beliefs.
"I'm not involved" in white nationalist groups, he said. "I'm on record as just being a conservative academic. I've been described pretty accurately as sort of a right wing green."
Another source of left-wing criticism of Tanton is that his original organization, FAIR, accepted about $1.2 million in funding between 1985 and 1994 from the New York-based Pioneer Fund.
The purpose of the fund is to "advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Critics such as the Southern Poverty Law Center call it a hate group because it has funded some activities of white nationalists including Taylor.
The fund defends itself on its Web site, saying it is simply interested in discovering any scientific bases for differences among races.
FAIR stopped accepting money from Pioneer after disclosure of the funding provided damaging publicity during 1994 California campaign on Proposition 187, which would have cut off social services to illegal immigrants.
California voters passed 187 but it was later overturned by a federal court.
flynnk at RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5247