Who could possibly be a bigger creep than Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine? The guy who tried to assassinate him, that’s who. Carol Townsend’s Blood In the Soil tells the tale of the man who attempted to murder the world’s most famous pornographer. It’s not a happy story.
Not surprisingly, Joseph Franklin had a miserable childhood. He grew up iimpoverished in Alabama. His parents were cruel and he had no friends. He dropped out of high school and turned to religion to find meaning and connection to a community. Up to a point, our basic capacity for sympathy kicks in and we can feel pity for him considering how terrible his upbringing was. But then we learn that he felt deeply hostile to the rise of integration, especially when it came to interracial dating. His search for community led him to join the Ku Klux Klan. You still might have an ounce of sympathy for him, thinking that because of his circumstances he was misguided and took a wrong turn in life. But it only gets worse from there. He regarded the Klan as little more than a fraternal drinking club and what he wanted was something on a more revolutionary scale. He decided to go on a terrorism and killing spree in order to spark a race war.
Franklin had a habit of frequenting newsstands and poring over their racks of pornographic magazines without paying for them, of course. He had a particular interest in Hustler but what he saw one day enraged him. Larry Flynt had published a pictorial of a naked African American man with a naked white woman, something that infuriated Franklin to the point of stealing a Ruger .44 semiautomatic rifle he would later use in an attempt on Larry Flynt’s life. Franklin claimed the pictorial layout was degrading to white women, but that is an odd opinion to have since he was highly abusive to the women in his life.
Flynt was in the town of Lawrenceville, Georgia on trial for obscenity. While he and his lawyer were walking from a restaurant to the courthouse, Franklin opened fire on them, nearly killing both. Flynt’s body was nearly ripped in half from the bullets and his spinal chord was almost severed. He managed to survive though and a good portion of this book gives details on the pain and suffering he went through after the attack. Larry Flynt’s biography is weird enough to merit its own book.
Franklin, meanwhile, went on a crime spree that included bombing synagogues, armed robberies, and shootings that mostly involved interracial couples. Overall, he is known to have killed 22 people. While his attempt on Flynt’s life takes up most of the oxygen in the room, it is important to remember the humanity of Franklin’s other victims, none of which were pornographers whose only crimes were having the wrong skin color and socializing with white people. They may be forgotten now, but remember they were the types of people who we have as friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members.
The story shifts between Carol Townsend’s narrative and testimony from the detective Michael Cowart who solved the case of Larry Flynt’s attempted assassination. Cowart spent time meeting with Joseph Franklin in to get an official confession from him. A lot of what we know about Franklin’s personality comes from Cowart’s interactions with him. Their meetings took place in a maximum security prison after Franklin had been incarcerated for other crimes. He was never charged or brought to trial for the assassination attempt because he was already on death row for a synagogue bombing.
Townsend never takes a deep dive into the mind of Joseph Franklin. Her explanations are predictable. His rotten childhood made him the monster he became. He was a psychopath. He never got the opportunities he needed, so on and so forth. These are generic explanations you get from any true crime book. There are lots of people who are born into similar circumstances who don’t become terrorists and serial killers so it would be useful to know what set Franklin apart from those others. Even worse, she tries to blame his pathological hatred on the racist history of the South by saying the soil is saturated with racism because of slavery and the Native American genocide. It’s as if the racism just radiated upwards into the Southern white community by osmosis and animated them to commit hate crimes against ethnic minorities. The problem with this is that racism exists wherever humans exist. All nations have been built on a foundation of conquest, bloodshed, and genocide so there isn’t any excuse for the American Southeast to stand out in regard to every other piece of land on planet Earth. Besides, saying that Joseph Franklin is a conduit for racist violence that preceded his existence is just a kind of way to provide an easy explanation where there isn’t one.
There is an interesting pattern to notice though. Many of the people Franklin shot were in pairs. Most of them were either interracial couples or pairs of friends. One involved a pair of African American men who were jogging together. Franklin was a loner who failed to make social connections with others, so there may be an element of jealousy in his murders. Since synagogues are also places of community, it is possible that the bombings of the Jewish temples grew out of resentment since he failed to find the type of religious congregation that suited his needs. Loneliness, isolation, and living without love and affection are fundamentally existential problems for individual humans.
Townsend starts this book by waxing poetic as if she wants to reiterate Truman Capote’s finely crafted true crime novel In Cold Blood. But her language is cliché and more purple prose than poetry so thankfully she drops the literary pretentions a short ways into the story and finishes with straightforward writing. For the most part, this is written like standard true crime fare.
Blood In the Soil is a gritty and depressing read about a man who possibly was little more than pure evil. Even before being executed, Joseph Franklin was given a chance to redeem himself, but his apologies were little more than an act. And Larry Flynt spent the rest of his life living as a millionaire pornographer in a gold-plated wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down. We’re left with the impression that our planet is a Hell that we often make worse through our own actions.
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