Blood and Politics (36 page)

David Duke’s fund-raising letter, sent to activists living in Forsyth County, Georgia, among others, promised the political breakthrough he had been touting for almost two years. His exuberance over the white riot in Georgia had stretched seamlessly into a run for president and then extended again into a run at the Louisiana statehouse. The once and future candidate now aimed at a representative’s seat from the Eighty-first District. In the months after the November election, Duke had switched his registration to the Republican Party as easily as he had once made the transition from a brown-shirted national socialist to a white-sheeted Klansman. He tried on party labels as if he were shopping for a new suit, Democrat, Populist, and Republican all in a short eighteen months.
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According to Duke, the largest factor affecting his decision to run for the legislature was his potential for success.
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He had sized up the Metairie district, just across the causeway from New Orleans. Of the 21,600 registered voters, only 60 were black. The seat had been vacated after its occupant had been named to a judgeship and there was no incumbent. Issues such as crime and drugs had already taken on a racially tinged cast. In 1979, when he ran as a Klansman for the state senate, he had placed second among voters from this district. And in the 1988 Democratic primary, he had received more district votes than most of the other candidates.
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While Duke saw his own name in future headlines, all the other candidates ignored him as a miscreant.

During the weeks before the primary, Duke campaigned the old-fashioned way—by knocking on doors. When voters answered, there stood a pleasant-looking, earnest gentleman wearing a sportscoat and tie while talking their talk. No scowling bigot in a white sheet or swastika armband. Duke told voters he was for “equal rights” for whites. Could he have their support? Once they said yes, they rarely changed their minds. Could he put a
DAVID DUKE FOR REPRESENTATIVE
sign in their yard? Enough people said yes that his campaign gave the appearance of momentum. Politics is, after all, the grandfather of all performance arts. The
appearance
of momentum produced momentum itself. His signs popped up on front lawns and busy intersections like mosquitoes swarming in a hot Louisiana swamp. Soon he wasn’t a miscreant pest at all, but a contender.

Instead of picking a former American Nazi Party captain as his campaign manager, as he had done in the presidential race, Duke enlisted two tough ex-cops whose street skills translated easily into the mechanics of political trench warfare. Soon they were supervising a raft of volunteers and defending Duke from spurious charges of anti-Catholicism. The two men became the campaign’s unsung workhorses.

Duke startled the political establishment by winning the first-round primary just two weeks before the above letter was mailed. Out of a field of seven, Duke had received 33 percent of the total—13,995 votes. His nearest competitor, Republican John Treen, whose brother had once been governor, received 2,277.

Candidate Treen marshaled all the resources he could command for the runoff. The president’s son (and future president himself) George W. Bush came to town and campaigned for the Republican regular. President Ronald Reagan, just months into his retirement, endorsed Treen in radio advertisements. President Bush publicly called Duke a racist. Lee Atwater, the strategic mastermind behind Bush’s victory that November, offered to come to Louisiana to help, but Treen’s campaign demurred.
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And as might be expected, Treen sent voters pictures of Duke parading around with a swastika armband, and reminded them that voting for a Klansman was no longer fashionable behavior.
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Those who had already decided to vote for Duke dismissed the big-time advertisements. They had their own opinions. Duke was for keeping the homestead exemption on taxes; Treen wasn’t. Duke was really against crime and the “welfare underclass.” His Klan credentials proved it. Treen was just another pretender. As one young white kid told his (white) playmate, “My Daddy says David Duke is gonna get rid of all the niggers.”
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On February 18, 1989, David Duke slipped past John Treen with 224 more votes out of the approximately 16,500 cast. For the next three years, debates raged among campaign professionals, academics, journalists, and civil rights activists over the “real” nature of voters’ support for Duke. Were they poor, uneducated bumpkins, down on their luck and looking for scapegoats? Was voting for Duke an act of “symbolic racism,” or did they really mean it? Weren’t they just angry and sending a message to the elites they loved to hate? Or was this the Republican Party’s southern strategy come home to roost; after twenty years of race-baiting, wasn’t it to be expected that a genuine white supremacist would win office? Or was it the other way around: Was David Duke leading where Republicans would soon follow? Polls would be taken. Studies were conducted. And books were written, but no conclusions were immediately in sight.

At that moment, however, David Duke had his own answer. He had beaten the president of the United States and the entire political establishment because he had vocalized what white people had privately thought, but could not say. Also, during the campaign, he had avoided talking about those parts of his belief system that he knew were still out of bounds.

Almost every corner of the movement hailed Duke’s victory as its own. One small-circulation newsletter from California claimed it was a “morale-booster” that “legitimize[d]” the desires of whites to “live racially-separate.”
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Ed Fields’s
Truth at Last
tabloid claimed “a new dawn for white people.”
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Willis Carto’s
Spotlight
was more circumspect, relegating the story to page sixteen and describing Duke as a “populist maverick,” not a consensus-shattering pioneer. Nevertheless, the tabloid did announce plans for Duke to speak at an upcoming Populist Party meeting. For their part, the Populists treated Duke’s victory as if a new earth had entered a new heaven. Despite the fact that Duke had jumped registrations, their newsletter gave him a full-page cover photo under a banner headline. Of Duke’s victory as a Republican, the party concluded: “The idea of using the political process for change has been conclusively proven. Aware Americans must stop giving money and time to every conservative organization and unite behind the Populist Party.”

The party’s leadership thought Duke’s election would redirect money and personnel from the movement generally toward its particular niche, electioneering. “The most obvious and undeniable lesson of all this is that David Duke has proven that it is through the electoral process we must work,” the newsletter opined. In a low-key criticism of other formations, it also claimed that “hundreds of patriotic educational organizations and debating societies have striven mightily . . . with precious little success.” On the other hand, “David Duke has achieved the long-sought goals of those groups overnight through one legislative race.”
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On March 4 the Populist Party national committee met at the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago and celebrated Duke’s success. Otherwise, the Populists wrestled once again with their long-standing liabilities. Obligatory reports on the party’s finances revealed that small amounts had been raised and spent on election year activities during 1988.
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Fewer than half of the party’s state affiliates sent voting delegations. Attendance was confined to the usual group of whiners and moaners, with the exception of a few new skinheads and Klan types from the Chicago area. While the party’s customary villains were discussed ad nauseam, campaign management and ballot access were remaindered to a few exhortations from the speakers’ platform.
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The election of officers revealed a new split in the Populist ranks, this time between Willis Carto and Don Wassall, who served as the party’s executive director from an office outside Pittsburgh. Articulate and a generation younger than Carto, Wassall had been the Populist Party state chairman in Pennsylvania. He regularly published a newsletter,
The Populist Observer
. Under his leadership, the Pennsylvanians fielded local candidates and looked almost like a small third party. When Carto reorganized the party’s apparatus in 1987, he had relied heavily on this infrastructure in Pennsylvania. Wassall began drawing a small salary, $19,500 a year,
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to run the headquarters, and his
Populist Observer
became the national party’s newsletter. As Wassall’s stature inside the party grew,
The Spotlight
reporter Mike Piper regularly promoted Wassall in Carto’s tabloid, adding to his prominence.

Because of his differences with Wassall, Carto did not attend this meeting in Chicago and was not elected to its executive committee, the first time since the party’s formation. Their dispute boiled down to a naked fight over control of the Populist Party’s decision-making apparatus. Any differences they exhibited over political strategy were secondary in nature. The problems started while making plans for the meeting. Carto wanted the program to pair conservative tax cutter Paul Gann with iconoclast Eugene McCarthy, known for his liberalism. It was a combination, Carto was sure, that would make “the media’s eyes . . . bug out.”
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Wassall rejected McCarthy, however, opting instead to feature the recently impeached former Arizona governor, Evan Mecham, a stalwart of ultraconservatives. Apparently, Mecham initially agreed to attend but pulled out at the last minute.

Wassall accused Carto of sabotaging the ex-governor’s appearance, presumably in a fit of spite following their differences over Gene McCarthy. Carto responded coyly to Wassall’s charge. He admitted calling Mecham’s office prior to the March meeting but claimed that the former governor had pulled out solely because of local pressures. Carto claimed that news had leaked back to Arizona Republicans that their former governor would be on the same platform as David Duke, and the former Kluxer was still considered out of bounds.
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What began as a genuine dispute over the meeting’s program soon degenerated into a petty spitting contest over the timing of the opening session. At one point Carto claimed, “I resent having to twiddle my thumbs for five hours,” while waiting for the event to start. Carto’s petulance at his underling’s impertinence would have worn better if the Populist Party had ever done anything more than eat, greet, and meet under his guidance. Wassall’s brash junior partner revolt, on the other hand, ventured little because there was nothing to lose. In the end, Carto’s tabloid spent the next several years describing Wassall as a drug-using, money-hungry “office manager,” like a bad secretary run amok.
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For the moment, Wassall held the upper hand inside the party. Tom McIntyre, the party chairman, was reelected. A. J. Barker, the North Carolina state chair, was elevated to national vice chairman. And three
former Klansmen—Don Black, now living in Florida; Van Loman, from Ohio; and John Warnock, from Arkansas—were among those elected to the executive committee.

The reshuffling of the leadership aside, the Chicago meeting’s grandest moment was the appearance of David Duke, who strode to the speakers’ podium as if he were the president of the United States about to address a joint session of Congress. He gloriously recounted how he had surmounted great obstacles and beaten the elites just three weeks before. He had countered the national Republican establishment and “New York” media with an aggressive grassroots campaign, he said.
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“It was a small enough district that we had a real chance to reach the public without a great expenditure of money,” he continued.
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Unstated was the importance of contributors Duke had developed during his national campaigns. He had raised thirty-five thousand dollars during January 1989, at the height of the race. Of that total, Louisiana supporters provided only fifty-eight hundred dollars, or 17 percent. California, Florida, Illinois, and New York, on the other hand, contributed the largest amounts of the balance. Duke knew that much of the money was raised from Liberty Lobby and Populist supporters in those states but didn’t say it out loud that day.
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He did tell the Populists, however, how he had mixed local and national issues. The homestead property tax exemption may have been a more important issue than his constant carping about the cost of maintaining the “welfare underclass.” He had campaigned against minority set-asides in state contracts and claimed they meant fewer jobs for white people. Affirmative action was similarly on his list of issues. But he had dropped other issues, such as immigration and the Federal Reserve “banksters” that he had promoted during his Populist campaign. Unlike any other self-avowed white supremacist at the time, Duke sensed his constituents’ concerns and was able to render “majority dispossession” into a palpable sentiment among a sector of white voters.

Duke also understood that his base of support had a class character. People “that have the high fences . . . guard dogs, the security systems, the people who can afford to send their kids to private schools,” didn’t support him, Duke reminded his Chicago audience. Those people voted for the mainstream Republican opponent.
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In fact, the base of Duke’s District 81 support came from Reagan Democrats, who had voted for Republicans in national elections but registered (and voted) Democratic in local elections.
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Louisiana Republican
Party officials were cognizant of the sea change represented by Duke. He was the first registered Republican to pick up these votes in a local election. Unlike the national party, state Republican officials feared that criticizing Duke would alienate his working-class voters.
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Duke too was aware of the repercussions. “We’re having a tremendous shift going on right now in this country,” he told the Chicago Populists. “We have started something; we have really started something from a small little race in Louisiana.”
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Much as he had felt after the 1987 mob violence in Forsyth County, Georgia, Duke saw in his District 81 election the nodal point of a transformed white movement. While Duke’s analysis was prescient, it also reflected his own solipsism. Whatever
he
happened to be doing at the moment, Duke usually considered it the most important historical development at that time. Like narcissists who worship their own reflections, when Duke saw his own image on the television, he believed it was reality.