Blood and Politics (11 page)

Duke later claimed that this torrent of violence undermined his effort to build a political machine.
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He had run again for the Louisiana senate and won 26 percent of the vote in 1979 and shortly thereafter began a short-lived presidential campaign. But the final cause of Duke’s disillusionment with the Klan may have been money. He had milked the white sheet crowd dry.
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And competing Klan factions were eating into this base of support. Duke decided it was time to find a new list of contributors. Several weeks after the Greensboro murders, he incorporated a second organization, with the market-friendly name National Association for the Advancement of White People. And he tried to quietly sell his Klan membership list to Bill Wilkinson for thirty-five thousand dollars, only to find that Wilkinson had arranged to expose Duke’s plan in the media. To Knights members, the scheme to sell their names was treasonous.
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David Duke resigned from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in July 1980. In the months and years that followed the once-powerful organization fell into disarray and then split into competing factions.
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It would be a mistake to conclude that Duke’s seven-year stint in the Klan had all come to naught. His innovative use of the media had turned the Klan into the most visible aspect of a broader white supremacist resurgence. He had helped transform the most vital elements of that new movement away from conservative or restorationist ideologies toward a more “revolutionary” emphasis on creating a new Aryans-only nation-state. And he had collected under one roof a set of state and local leaders who became major figures in their own right over the next several decades.

Several important state leaders left the Knights to start their own operations, drawing money and members away from the Knights. One of the most creative tacticians was Tom Metzger, the California Knights leader who had organized the so-called border watch. He had quit Duke early and formed his own California Klan. And then Metzger ran for office in 1980.

June 3, 1980.
Tom Metzger spent less than fifty-four hundred dollars running in the Democratic Party primary for California’s Forty-third Congressional District seat. Although he was physically unimposing at five feet eight inches, Metzger loved a good street fight. And as a well-known Klan leader he maintained little separation between looking for votes and knocking heads with clubs and shields. During the campaign Metzger marched his Klan troops into a street brawl in the town of Oceanside, made an appearance at San Diego State University only to be pelted with bottles and fruit, paid for radio advertisements, and shook hands looking for votes. He declared himself the white working-man’s candidate and opposed “white collar crime . . . export of U.S. jobs . . . foreign product dumping . . . the unrestricted flow of illegal aliens . . . [and] Asian refugee entrance into the United States.” The anti-immigrant message, according to the local press, carried the day. On primary election night, Metzger received 32,344 votes and, with 39 percent of the ballot, defeated the closest Democratic Party contender.
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Although the Republican incumbent won the general election, the Klansman’s primary victory showed that racially motivated white voters existed in some number. The campaign also dramatized the restless experimentation that characterized Tom Metzger’s personal brand of white power politics. His route to the Klan had started in Warsaw, Indiana, where he was born in 1938. After serving in the army, he moved to Southern California and eventually established his own TV repair shop business. He married Kathleen Murphy in a Catholic service in 1963, and their union ultimately produced six children. During the 1964 Goldwater campaign, Tom joined the John Birch Society. He supported George Wallace in 1968 and thereafter became a self-avowed racist and
anti-Semite. When David Duke came to California to start a Klan group, Metzger signed on. It was Tom Metzger, by then Grand Dragon, or state leader, who stage-managed Duke’s so-called border watch in 1978. When Metzger broke away from Duke’s national outfit, he started his own California Klan realm before running in the primary.
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Metzger was not the only self-avowed white supremacist running for office in 1980. A National Socialist White People’s Party chief, Harold Covington, received fifty-four thousand votes, 40 percent of the total, in the North Carolina Republican Party’s primary for state attorney general. And in Michigan, Gerald Carlson, a member of a different national socialist sect, won the Republican Party’s nomination in the heavily Democratic Fifteenth Congressional District. Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
took note of these results and opined simply that “voters [were] ready for a change.”
³

That November, Republican Ronald Reagan won 50.7 percent of the popular vote for president, defeating a sitting Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and an independent candidate, John Anderson, in a three-way race. Reagan had long been a figure on the far right wing of the Republican Party. He supported Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, won California’s governorship in 1966, and campaigned in the 1976 Republican primaries against President Gerald Ford. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan mastered the art of racist innuendo, including talk in his stump speech about the supposed crimes committed by “welfare queens.” He aggressively sought the votes of disgruntled white people, including southern Democrats unhappy with their national party’s racial liberalism. Just after the Republican Party’s convention, Reagan made a campaign stop in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by a gang of Klan killers in 1964. That case had electrified the country at the time, and the acquittals by an all-white jury remained a visible stain on Neshoba County’s reputation. Nevertheless, Reagan went to its county fair and, before a sea of thirty thousand white faces, uttered the magic words “I believe in states’ rights.” The claim to “states’ rights” had been used by slavers and segregationists since the founding of the Republic and most recently by Alabama Governor George Wallace. Reagan won the votes of former Wallaceites, along with those of anti-communists, boosters of greater military spending, opponents of federal regulation and antitax budget busters, and growing legions of social and cultural conservatives.
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It became common among antiracists and liberals to talk about Reagan’s
election as if it were the
cause
of conservative and right-wing ascendancy. But his election in 1980 was more the
result
of a right-wing rebirth during the latter half of the 1970s. Organizations, think tanks, and churches known variously as the New Right or religious right had sprouted up after Nixon’s resignation. They defeated a drive to pass an equal rights amendment for women. They attacked the Supreme Court, the target of segregationists since its decision in
Brown
, for a 1962 ruling that prayer in public schools violated the First Amendment and for its 1973 ruling in
Roe v. Wade
affirming a right to privacy regarding abortion. They opposed basic civil rights for gay men and lesbians and occasionally remarked that “God does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” They watched the Reverend Jerry Falwell on television, believed that the United States was, by rights, a Christian nation, and after 1979 joined Falwell’s Moral Majority organization. They also created a broad-based mass movement of angry white people.
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Antibusing mobilizations in Louisville and Boston were less about the specifics of educational policy (some black folks also opposed busing) and more about the inclusion of black people in the lives of white people. An antitax referendum in California, Proposition 13, passed in 1978. Support for the measure broke down largely along racial lines, and opposition to taxes became the calling card of white middle-class anger at both the black poor and any government action that seemed to respond to the issues of poverty and racism.
⁶

In contrast with the ideology of Carto and Pierce, this new movement simply assumed its whiteness rather than reified it. It identified itself in the political arena according to its faith, not its skin color. It did not respond to calls for racial dominance as such. To this constituency, Reagan articulated “a politics of generalized government restraint . . . [and] mastered the excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse,” according to Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall in
Chain Reaction
, even while attacking policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities.
⁷
These conservatives regarded Ronald Reagan’s election as a shining moment. The period of 1960s-style liberal hegemony had ended.

For white supremacists, Ronald Reagan’s election proved more mottled and gray than pure and clear. “There is good news and bad news on Reagan’s smashing win over Carter,” the remnants of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan argued.
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Liberty Lobby also wrestled with its approach to the conservative Republican ascendancy, and it had even more at stake than
Klan groups and national socialist agitators. Four years of opposition to Jimmy Carter’s Democratic presidency had been good for Liberty Lobby. It had nabbed new listeners for its radio broadcasts and attracted subscribers to its weekly tabloid, eager to read its latest exposé of the Council on Foreign Relations or the treaty ceding sovereignty over the Panama Canal.

“We were the first to expose to light the drug-soaked Carter regime,”
The Spotlight
crowed. “We are proud of the dozens if not hundreds of factual exposures of Jimmy Carter and his gang we exclusively printed.”
⁹

Just weeks after President Reagan’s inauguration,
The Spotlight
celebrated its attainment of “one third of a million paid subscribers.” A National Press Club ballroom gala featured congratulations from Congressman George Hansen, a Republican from Idaho who became a recurring figure in Liberty Lobby circles.
¹⁰
At the same time, Carto’s outfit remained undecided about the new administration taking office. On one hand, it took positive note of Reagan’s nationalist rhetoric. On the other hand, it opposed the “Trilateralists, Zionists, and other internationalist stooges he [Reagan] has surrounded himself with.”
¹¹

While Liberty Lobby weighed the new presidency, Reagan’s nomination of Warren Richardson to the post of assistant secretary of health and human services became a test of whether or not Liberty Lobby would find a seat in the Reagan administration. Richardson had worked as a professional Washington insider whose employers included the National Right to Work Committee and the National Lumber Manufacturers Association. He had also worked at Liberty Lobby from 1969 to 1973, serving as general counsel and testifying on freedom of the press issues before Congress. For these services, Willis Carto had paid him fifteen thousand dollars a year.
¹²
After Richardson’s formal employment ended,
The Spotlight
still counted him a friend, but when reporters uncovered his past affiliation during the vetting process, Richardson attempted to distance himself from Liberty Lobby and insisted that he was not an anti-Semite. He also wrote a memo denouncing Liberty Lobby’s “anti-Jewish and racist actions.” Despite these repeated denials, Richardson’s connection to Carto’s operation doomed his nomination. He withdrew from consideration on April 24, 1981.
¹³

At first,
The Spotlight
excoriated news sources that had reported on the matter rather than directly attack the administration. Lobby officials also sent a polite letter to President Reagan contending the organization was not anti-Semitic but simply anti-Zionist. “Opposition to Zionism has nothing to do with opposition to Jews or Judaism,” they wrote.
¹⁴
When Liberty Lobby did finally criticize the administration for failing
to back Richardson’s nomination, it used language so obtuse that a casual reader might need a translator to guess that an angry dispute was under way.
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By the time the whole affair ended the ambivalence had been squeezed out of Liberty Lobby’s analysis. For twenty years Willis Carto had portrayed the Lobby as a “conservative” and “nationalist” institution. Now
The Spotlight
took full aim at conservatism, which “diligently avoids controversy in regard to Zionism, race, money and banking, and Trilateralism.”
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In its earliest years the Reagan administration had been indifferent to Ku Klux Klan violence. William Bradford Reynolds, who headed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, balked at enforcing federal civil rights. When marauding Klansmen shot five black women while they walked down a public street in Chattanooga in 1980, for example, Reynolds refused to indict them, claiming that “there is insufficient evidence on which to prosecute pursuant to the federal criminal civil rights statutes.”
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When a white mob attacked civil rights marchers in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1987, Reynolds regarded the action as “childish prattle,” rather than a significant breach of civil rights requiring federal redress.
¹⁸
In fact, for Reynolds, Attorney General Edwin Meese, and President Reagan, the principal civil rights battle was not against racist violence but against affirmative action for black people and women in hiring and education.

According to Drew Days III, who had been the Justice Department’s civil rights chief in President Carter’s administration, Reynolds sought to repeal policies that had previously guided civil rights enforcement.
¹⁹
Instead of addressing discrimination against entire classes of people, Reynolds narrowed Justice Department protection to lone individuals. And instead of aggressive federal intervention, Reynolds and Reagan invoked a post–civil rights era formula based on states’ rights and a policy of “benign neglect.”
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