User talk:Mark Arsten/sandbox

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Early life
Jesse Benjamin Stoner, Jr., was born in Walker County, Georgia, on April 13, 1924. At the age of two, he suffered from Polio, leaving one leg disabled. The next year, his father died; his mother died while he was a teenager. His sufferings notwithstanding, Stoner's family was moderately wealthy and he attended exclusive schools, becoming a lawyer in 1951. Webb describes him as "clubfooted and somewhat corpulent".

Commentators often speculated that Stoner grew to dislike minorities because of a desire to find a scapegoat for his personal difficulties. Webb, disputes this, noting that Stoner himself attributed his early racism to the suspicion that Blacks held a secret disdain for whites. He grew to hate Jews, as well, feeling that they were hostile to the idea of white supremacy. Owing to these opinions, he developed a fondness for far-right politics and Nazism as a teenager. A letter that he wrote to Fred W. Kaltenbach praising Nazi Germany was published in 1940 on the radio broadcast of Lord Haw-Haw, a German propagandist. In the early 1940s, Stoner joined the Association of Georgia Klans. In the mid-1940s, Stoner came to see Theodore G. Bilbo as a hero. Stetson Kennedy witnessed an address that Stoner gave at a Klan gathering in the mid-1940s at which he called for the elimination of the Jewish people. In 1945, he founded the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party to call for the criminalization of Judaism. He published a tract known as "The Gospel of Jesus Christ Versus the Jews" in 1946. Within the next six years, he broke with the Klan on account of his agitation for the removal of Jews from Chattanooga he was expelled from the Klan. Stoner was drawn to the States' Rights Democratic Party, attending their convention in 1948. That year, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in Tennessee's 3rd congressional district, although he had difficulty raising funds. He won about three percent of the vote, but was not dissuaded from politics by the vote.

Stoner remained a low-profile activist until 1958, when he founded the National States' Rights Party. The organization united several smaller organizations. Its first meeting was held in Louisville. It was led to solidly middle-class individuals, but its rhetoric associated it with the poorer working class. Its membership drew from young people and union members in the Southeastern U.S. It was initially based in Jefforsonville, Indiana, and then in Birmingham, Alabama. They had a military style uniform and adopted a lightning bolt over the Confederate flag as their symbol. At its height, it had a membership of about 500, although its newsletter had a circulation of 25,000 at one point. They emphasized that they were acting in the spirit of the Founding Fathers and were drawn to direct action. Some of their rhetoric was likely drawn from Bilbo's influence on Stoner. In the party's propaganda, Stoner asserted that African Americans had no soul, and were not fully human, although he identified Jews as the most grave threat to white Americans. They also used some religious language; Gordon Winrod served as their first chaplain. The party called for minorities to be deported from the U.S. and their assets to be taken by whites. They also sought to convince people not to hire blacks. After party members were suspected in the 1958 bombing of a black church, law enforcement began to suspect that Stoner had ties to a terrorist group. From 1958 to 1964, Stoner served as the General Council of the party, and he was their vice-presidential candidate in the 1964 election. Afterwards, he became their vice-chairman. Stoner also became known for courtroom defenses of whites accused of violence against blacks.

In the late 1950s, Stoner became concerned with the increasing numbers of black Muslims and the Nation of Islam. He had previously argued that blacks were controlled by Jews; the NOI's disdain for Jews challenged this mindsetl. He saw Elijah Muhammed as an "evil genius". Although he had previously encouraged representatives of the United Negro Improvement Association, which encouraged African American emigration, he rejected non-aggression towards the Nation of Islam. This may have been due to fears about their revolutionary sentiment.

"The Gospel of Jesus Christ Versus the Jews" anticipated some aspects of the Christian Identity movement. It rejected of the idea that Jews retained the status of God's chosen people, claiming that only Christians are by virtue of their faith in Christ. In the document, Stoner wrote that Jews were "Satanically insane" and to blame for many issues that plagued society, including divorce and abortion. He felt he had uncovered a dangerous conspiracy and needed to spread awareness of it. In the 1970s, Stoner published an accompanying document known as "Christ Not a Jew and Jews Not God's Chosen People". In that work he argued that the Bible does not describe the Jews as under a divine blessing. In it, Stoner showed that he retained almost all of his previous opinions on the subject. -->