FARRAGUT, TENN. — There would be no screaming at Rand Cardwell's meeting tonight, no histrionics, no playing to the cameras. The atmosphere was PTA. Garden Club. Kiwanis.
Cardwell had called this second meeting of the local chapter of Oath Keepers, and on a recent Tuesday night about 16 of his fellow Tennesseans trickled into a suburban Town Hall community room. Now they sat quietly around some folding tables, with all eyes on Cardwell, the chapter president.
Cardwell, a 48-year-old laid-off aluminum plant worker, was new to this activism stuff, but he wasn't nervous. He'd led enough meetings back in his days as a Marine Corps sergeant.
The group who had answered his call was made up of men and women. Some were just off work, while others were dressed in the casual garb of the retired and unemployed. All were white, which was no surprise in this white-majority Appalachian county. But they brought a diversity of worries.
Bobby May, 44, a laid-off salesman, feared that the Obama administration would restrict his gun rights.
Ben Kazinec, 31, an employee with Kraft Foods, had heard that the U.S. armed forces were training with foreign troops to respond to domestic emergencies. "I feel threatened by it," he said with an incongruous smile.
A woman who gave her name, and then retracted it, harbored doubts about the president's citizenship.
"All right," Cardwell said, in a low, firm voice touched with his native mountain lilt. "Let's kick this thing off."
The first order of business was a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which called the Oath Keepers -- which claims more than 1,000 members nationwide -- a "particularly worrisome example" of a "virulently antigovernment 'Patriot' movement" that has been reinvigorated, in part, by the fact that the president is black.
The center documented angry videos that had been posted on the Oath Keepers website; in one of them, a man called Obama an "enemy of the state."
Cardwell betrayed only a hint of the exasperation that this line of criticism stirs in him. Nothing, he said, could be further from the truth. He served side by side in the Corps with African Americans. One of his best friends is a black guy.
"Our goal," he said, "is to support and defend the Constitution, and that's where it begins and ends at. . . . We're not a hate group. We're not a racist group. We're not calling for armed revolt against the government."
