Thomas Naylor and His Early pre-SVR Ties to the neo-Confederates

When I first began to look a few weeks ago at the secession movement here in Vermont and some of its members and advisers ties to neo-Confederate hate groups such as the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans [1] [2], it struck me that the organization here also had strategic similarities to those groups.  The response of the supporters of Second Vermont Republic to the revelations on this and other blogs has been to unjustifiably smear hate group monitoring organizations and to minimize the importance of the connections and involvement of SVR leadership and advisers to white supremacists and extremists in the neo-Confederate movement, much as the southern secessionist organizations commonly do when they encounter such charges.

Such charges were more easily made decades ago because of the often extreme behavior of the movement's members.  In the 1990's a newer leadership took hold of the, by then, faltering groups and organizations.  This new leadership understood that in order for the committed white supremacists to ever have a chance to advance The Cause, the groups would have to improve their image, although not necessarily their objectives.  The League of the South was one such group that I've spoken at length about here.

A lesser know group, but by no means less important to the secession discussion, is the hate group Sons of Confederate Veterans.  The past few years have been strife ridden ones for the SCV with the result being that the more radical, racialist elements have taken control. One of the principals involved in the leadership uphevel at SCV is Ron Holland.  Ron Holland is the editor of Dixie Daily News, a member of the League of the South and a former leader of the Southern Party. [3] [4] Holland is also a founder of the Southern Party. [5]  An important founding document of the Southern Party is the Ashville Declaration in which Naylor and Donald Livingston are referenced. [6]  The Southern Party was a political party that grew from the Southern Nationalist Movement and most secessionist promotions of the party pointed to its organization and development by southern "scholars," a term we hear used often by SVR when describing their own advisers. [7]  At Holland's website I found this brief reference to his friendship, not merely an association, with Thomas Naylor, founder of Second Vermont Republic. [8]

I also found this reference to a panel at a LoS conference in 2000 that Holland served on with the racist, J. Michael Hill:

"... Dr. Michael Hill “The Evils of a Watchdog Group: the SPLC and the League” Dr. Hill recaps the recent “hate group” report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, citing examples of ignorance and hate from those people. Reports from Jeff McCormick & Ron Holland"

These criticisms are nearly identical to those now being leveled by the leadership of SVR at SPLC as a result of connections now being documented here by way of SPLC Intelligence Reports on the white supremacists at LoS.

One early reference to Naylor's thoughts, years before his founding of SVR, on the LoS's creation, the Southern Party, came from an AP story shortly after the party's creation:

"Thomas Naylor, professor emeritus of economics at Duke University in Durham, thinks the Southern Party is right on. In fact, he thinks his adopted state of Vermont should band with New Hampshire and Maine and join Canada's Maritime provinces, which he believes have more in common with each other than with, say, California or Texas.

"The government is too big because the whole damn country is too big," says Naylor, co-author of the 1997 book "Downsizing the U.S.A."
- June 25, 1999 [9]

Continuing his earlier close relationship with LoS and its members [10] , as recently October 2, 2006 Naylor appeared on a League of the South Conference schedule with such notable neo-Confederates as J. Michael Hill and conference fundraiser and interim Tennessesse LoS Chairman Franklin Sanders. [11] [12]

The searches above were made using only the most rudimentary of search tools, a Google or Google cache. There were many more similar finds with additional primary figures in the neo-Confederate movement.  The above represent an outline of the period covering change and development of white separatist, and essentially theocratic, southern secessionist groups.  Naylor was there.  Taken alone, any one of these facts means little but, when looked at over the years, this circle of relationships and associations with such a close group of racist ideologues certainly raises the question of how tightly bound the founder of the Second Vermont Republic is to the white supremacist community.