Corruption / Laid Low

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HOLDER FAMILY IN THE NEW WORLD

In 1492 seven Holders, including one Pastor Mark Holder, arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower. They and their progeny summarily executed dozens of people, Indian and Pilgrim, whom they disliked. Many of these deaths were made to look like accidents or acts of God. They laid low.

By 1592 Holders had been some of the few lucky white people to survive several bleak winters, early in the colonization of the United States, mostly earning that luck through causing the bad luck of others. Aside from bribery, extortion, and stealing supplies, they laid low.

In 1692 Holders had actively instigated the Salem Witch Trials, and their cousins on mission in China secured the right to convert Chinese people to missionaries. Jacob and Adam Holder met with the fourth Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Kangxi, and conned him into the religious colonization of the Chinese. In exchange, the young men would educate Kangxi in delicate wartime maneuvering. Kangxi had enemies in academia, but he would gradually transition them into cushy government jobs, a trick he’d learned from Jacob Holder, the first legally-declared US missionary to China.

In 1792, the first Columbus Day celebration was held in New York City, thanks to the organizing and funding of Italian nationalist Christian Colum, and his neighbors David and Judith Holder. David had wanted to encourage his neighbor to celebrate his white heritage. David regularly attended meetings, and he and Judith were active participants, in spaces where white people would proudly proclaim their superiority to all other races. In this way, Holders agitated New York’s Italian community into white supremacy, while they laid low.

Out West in the early 1800s, Holder descendants were having a lovely time committing acts of genocide against the Northern Arapaho. A few of these descendants fled the family to join a religious sect. Their murderous siblings and parents drove them to lives of chastity.

In 1892, law enforcement officer Leviticus Holder drew a weapon on Homer Plessy, a mixed race man sitting on a whites-only traincar. Plessy sued and lost in a famous Supreme Court case. Had Leviticus Holder not been a white supremacist, there may never have been “separate but equal.” After the verdict, Holder quit his job, living off the money his buddies in the Klan raised for him when he was in trouble. He laid low.

One night in 1895, a particularly nefarious family of Holders disappeared from Nashville, Tennessee bound for the west coast. They changed their last name to Norman. They laid low.

In 1965, a teenager in Denver, Colorado received $500 from an anonymous source to stab Howard F. Dunwarder on his walk back to his car. The stabbing was supposed to send a message to Howard. The messenger was Hank Holder. Hank had worked through proxies to hire the teenager. The messenger was an overly ambitious young man who owned a very large knife. The stabbing intended to leave Howard shaken and force his hand in a contract negotiation. Due to the teenager’s ambition, it became a homicide with no suspects. The teenager stole Howard F. Dunwarder’s wallet as he lay dying in the parking lot, unable to breathe, so the police assumed it was a mugging that became a murder, not the other way around.

In 1995, when Timothy McVeigh exploded a Federal Building, a Holder chuckled at his television screen. In 2005 a former Holder son-in-law who lost his wife to the mafia snapped and killed four constables from the Royal Canadian Mounted Patrol.

And during their hundred-year leaps, the family grew, generation after generation having children, marrying-in various criminal elements as was appropriate for whatever life of crime that Holder lived.

Since 1492, various Holders had been pretending to be pious businessmen, creating shell companies for nefarious purposes, and seeking to advance white supremacy. They had evaded taxes, funded extremists, laundered money, extorted elected officials after illegally spying on elected officials. The Holders stole their fortunes. No individual Holder made too egregious a fortune, in the spirit of laying low, but in total all the Holders amassed quite the lot of ill-gotten gains. The Holders took just enough from just enough people to get by, by extension having taken much from many. Their descendants in California’s Normans, and the religious separatists who had fled for Utah, never overcame the family tendency to take what they wanted by any means necessary, though their methods became less audacious, sometimes towing more to the legal than the illicit.

In 2015, Lyle Holder sat in the parking lot of the Six Different Award Show Gala with a pistol in his hands, shining it grubbily while hiding it from passers-by, and staring out the windshield at the door to the convention center.