Bob Schaffer likes to say that
Pete Coors isn't conservative enough for the Colorado GOP. But Schaffer, a principled conservative Republican in his own right (and also relatively easy for Salazar to beat in November), doesn't know Coors so well as he thinks.
Specifically, he hasn't read The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism, a book written in 1990 by award-winning investigative reporter Russ Bellant as an exposé of the Coors family's extreme right-wing causes. According to Bellant, the Coors family, including Pete himself, has personally bankrolled a number of America's most hateful reactionary groups. These include the Heritage and Free Congress Foundations (both founded by Pete Coors' father Joe); various KKK members; Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Hungarian Nazi; and Roger Pearson, who was at one time the world's leading advocate of militant eugenics.
Here on DailyKos, I will examine in series each and every one of these allegations. The goal: to spead the truth and keep faux-moderate Pete Coors from becoming America's most reactionary Senator.
Part Three: Pete Coors and the KKK
Question: What do you do when you discover that a member of the board of directors of an organization you founded and monetarily support is a former state leader of the
Ku Klux Klan? Answer: keep him there -- if you're a member of the Coors family, that is.
In this case, the organization in question is the Council for National Policy, which Bellant describes as "a secretive group of the foremost right-wing activists and funders in the United States" (p. 36). According to Council member Morton Blackwell, "The policy [of CNP] is that we don't discuss who attends the meetings or what is said" (p. 36). However, it is known that convicted Iran-Contra felon Oliver North and extreme right-wing Louisiana politician Louis "Woody" Jenkins were founding members of the Council for National Policy. The organization appears to be a secret breeding ground for ideas among this country's most reactionary political leaders.
Now, about that KKK business. One of the directors of the Council for National Policy was Richard Shoff, who in the early 1970's was Grand Kilgrapp of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan. (For the uninitiated in Klan titles, that makes him state secretary of the organization.) "According to the head of the Indiana KKK," writes Bellant, "Shoff was also a generous funder of Klan activities" (p. 54). Shoff was also involved with a other hate organizations, including the Conservative Caucus, "a group which cheerleads for the apartheid regime in South Africa" (p. 38). Shoff was also caught in a fundraising scandal in which "funds [he] collected under the name "Children with AIDS Foundation" were slated to support a homophobic right-wing religious activist, Rev. H. Edward Rowe..." (p. 38).
In short, Richard Shoff was a despicable right-wing nutcase with KKK ties. So why would the Coors family retain him on the board of their Council for National Policy? Simple -- because the Coors family has Klan ties of its own.
"The Coors Foundation," writes Bellant, "gave $2500 in 1981 to the ultra-rightist Patriotic American Youth, Inc., a group which also distributes explicitly racist literature. The masthead of their related publication mailed from Jackson, Mississippi included names of figures active in the segregationist Citizen's Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. Also active with the group was Judge Tom Brady, whose efforts inspired the formation of the segregationist Citizen's Councils in the 1950's to oppose the 1954 Supreme Court decision striking down the concept of separate but equal in Brown v. Board of Education" (p. 72).
Even with this direct Coors connection to the KKK, though, we can't fully recognize the depth of racism inherent in the Coors family until we examine the words of William Coors, Pete's uncle. In 1984, he told a group of African-American businessmen in Denver that "probably the greatest favor that anybody ever did you, was to drag your ancestors over here in chains, and I mean it. ... [Blacks] lack the intellectual capacity to succeed..." (p. 67)
Suddenly it doesn't seem so strange that the Coors family would maintain a Klan leader as director in one of their pet organizations -- the family holds racist views similar to, or even more extreme than, the KKK.
The Pete Coors Connection
Once again, Peter Coors managed to keep himself free of any personal responsibility for the Coors family's racist views -- at least that we can prove, that is. But he can't escape the fact that the Coors Foundation, in which Peter played an influential role after the handover of power to his generation in 1987, continued to fund the Council for National Policy after that year, while Richard Shoff sat on the board of the CNP. (pp. xiii, 46) KKK connections, it seems, make a wonderful background for a U.S. Senate candidacy.
Part Two: Pete Coors and the Nazis
Part One: Pete Coors and the Eugenicists