Blood and Politics (37 page)

Despite Duke’s mediagenic presence, the Populist Party was itself not ready for prime time. Immediately following his closed-door speech to the party faithful, Duke planned an open-door press conference for local media. Before the press conference started, however, one of Duke’s bodyguards, Art Jones, started pushing a television reporter around and calling him names. Jones was well known in Chicago as an American Nazi Party activist and sometime candidate for local office, and his thuggish behavior that day was recorded for local and then national news.
²⁴
Thus, as the Populist meeting ended, the party projected a public image of neo-Nazi gangsters and dissembling pretty-boy racists trying to deny the obvious. Gone was the picture it had hoped to project: an elected official concerned about affirmative action and minority set-asides.

Duke’s imbroglio in Chicago followed him home to Louisiana in the person of Beth Rickey. Then a pert Republican Party state central committee member from New Orleans in her early thirties, she had been a Republican long before being a Republican in Louisiana was cool. Her father, whom she revered, had been a Republican businessman in the era of Huey Long, when being a Democrat would have been more profitable. He had come home from World War Two with a firm line in his own mind between fascism and his own anti-communist conservatism. Beth considered her own politics a continuation of her father’s, and she had been an eager Ronald Reagan delegate to the Republican Party’s 1976 convention, which nominated Gerald Ford. With Reagan’s ascension
to the presidency, Beth found herself at the top of the state party apparatus. During the race for the District 81 seat, she had worked on her friend John Treen’s campaign, only to have David Duke come across her radar screen like a Stuka bomber. Appalled that someone who had worn a Nazi Party uniform, the uniform her father had fought, would win office, Rickey put Duke in her political sights.
²⁵

After the election, Rickey followed Duke up to Chicago, where she attended the Populist Party meeting and taped his speech. After witnessing Art Jones’s thuggery and sitting in a room with tattooed skinheads, she brought home the news that Duke’s days with neo-Nazis and Ku Kluxers were not over.

During the campaign, Duke’s past in the Ku Klux Klan had cut both ways. Remember that Carto’s
Spotlight
had predicted that Duke’s notorious past virtually guaranteed press coverage of his presidential bid. (It had been a bad estimate.) During the state race, Duke used his Klan past to remind white voters that he was a serious racist and not a onetime dilettante. At the same time, Duke repeatedly argued that his Klan membership had been a youthful indiscretion, replaced by a more mature advocacy of “equal rights for all and special privileges for none.” He was a different person now, he said. And he sounded this theme at every available opportunity.

Duke’s argument that he had changed was inadvertently aided by his opponents. While candidate Treen and
The Times-Picayune
(New Orleans) constantly replayed images from Duke’s past, they did little to expose his contemporary connection to the white supremacist movement.
²⁶

The attitude of District 81 voters toward Duke’s Klan past became a salient indicator of how they would pull the lever. Of those who voted for Duke, 83 percent believed he had changed from his days as a Kluxer, but 98 percent of those who voted for Duke’s opponent believed he had not changed.
²⁷
And as Duke constantly reminded his constituents, American public life was littered with respectable political figures who had once been Klan members. Robert Byrd had been a Klan minichief before he became a senator from West Virginia. Hugo Black had joined the Klan in 1923, and his resignation two years later had been a mere question of electioneering tactics, not ideological principle. Only later did Senator Black become a liberal and win nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
²⁸
Could ex-Klansmen become only liberals? Duke asked. Was his conversion less legitimate because he had become a Republican conservative rather than a Democratic liberal like Byrd and Black?

Republican Rickey’s complaint was more pointed. Duke had been first a national socialist, before becoming a Klansman. And polling data showed that white voters disapproved of Duke’s days as a neo-Nazi in greater numbers than they disapproved of his past as a Klansman.
²⁹
(Apparently Duke had understood this distinction between the perception of a German-tinged neo-Nazi and a native Klansman when he first decided to become a Kluxer.) Rickey and a newly formed political action committee, Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, argued that Duke had never forsaken the biological determinism or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories common to both the Klan and national socialists. After the Chicago meeting, her message was simply that Duke’s past and present were essentially the same.

One of New Orleans’s local television newsmagazines picked up the question in the weeks after Duke was caught with Art Jones and crowd in Chicago. When a reporter asked him about his Populist Party candidacy (an issue that had rarely come up during the campaign), Duke danced around the question. When you are at the “bottom of the political bucket,” he told the reporter, you take help where you can get it. When asked about Art Jones, Duke replied that Jones was just a “Nazi kook running for office.” No hint of irony showed on his televised face. Asked about denying the Holocaust, Duke was equally evasive. Sure, there had been atrocities, but “it was possible that some of the atrocities were exaggerated.” And asked about anti-Semitism, he said, “What am I saying against Jewish people? Tell me one thing.”
³⁰

In response to Duke’s claims that his views had changed, Rickey’s colleague at the aforementioned Louisiana coalition, Lance Hill, analyzed Duke’s current ideology and political behavior and compared it with Adolf Hitler’s prior to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Hill’s conclusion, in a monograph that became the basis of the coalition’s work: despite changes in costume and coloring, Duke’s ideas had remained essentially unchanged since his days as a national socialist youth.
³¹
It took the coalition two more years of campaigning, but eventually a significant minority of white people in Louisiana drew the same conclusion.

Meanwhile, convinced that the newly elected legislator represented an evil and corrupting influence on her party, Elizabeth Rickey began a lonely battle to save it. She met with national Republican leaders in D.C., who had already roundly condemned Duke. The Louisiana state Republicans, by contrast, had stayed quiet and tacitly accepted Duke. Rickey knew that one of the party’s best strategists was even helping Duke learn the backroom ropes. So Rickey tried to take a half step. She
decided to ask the state central committee for only an investigation, rather than immediate censure.
³²
Three months after the election, she submitted a resolution that read in part:

Whereas, while Representative David Duke maintains publicly that he has abandoned his former Ku Klux Klan perspective, he continues to disseminate virulent anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and violent literature through the auspices of his legislative office in Metarie, Louisiana, and

Whereas, these actions undermine the principles of the Republican Party and call into question Representative Duke’s fidelity to the party and respect for the legislature.

Therefore, be it resolved that the Republican State Central Committee appoint a sub-committee charged with investigating the above evidence and submitting a report within sixty days.

Rickey could have compiled a list of whereases and therefores longer than the snake in Pete Peters’s Garden of Eden, however, and her Republican colleagues would neither censure nor investigate the newest addition to their caucus. In addition to bringing the party new votes from Democratic precincts, Duke quickly established himself as the point man opposed to a tax reform plan offered by Governor Buddy Roemer. When voters rejected Roemer’s proposals in April 1989, it became immediately apparent that Duke owned a statewide constituency, extending far beyond blue-collar voters in District 81. Although none of his legislative proposals was made law that summer, Duke’s Republican colleagues decided not to challenge him directly. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d shown up in Baton Rouge in black leather jackboots; some would have decided his suit was haute fashion and worn boots themselves if it meant winning votes. On Saturday, September 23, four months after she had first offered it, Beth Rickey’s resolution was officially tabled in committee. The inability of Republican state officials to withstand David Duke’s blandishments was a sign of the full-scale political battles ahead.

Duke’s relatively rapid transformation exemplified the contradictions within and around the white supremacist enterprise in the late 1980s: the movement’s vanguardists had beaten the government’s prosecution at Fort Smith but lay weak and shattered in the trial’s aftermath. Pete Peters’s Bible camp had supplanted the CSA’s paramilitary training, and he had successfully led the opposition to civil rights for gay men and lesbians. Nevertheless, Christian fundamentalist leaders such as Falwell
and Robertson still considered his Identity theology off-limits. Willis Carto’s Populist Party, after four years of nurturance, had finally produced a winning candidate—who was a Republican. It seemed as if white supremacists could find a niche inside the mainstream as long as they did not name their true politics.

October 7, 1989.
It was a warm, sunny fall day in Pulaski, Tennessee, the 1866 birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Klan robes that day, however, were out of vogue. The fashion statement du jour was T-shirts, ball caps, and the skinhead uniform: red suspenders snapped to blue jeans over black Dr. Martens boots. T-shirts were emblazoned with the names of bands—Skrewdriver and Bound for Glory—or slogans such as “Just Say No to ZOG” in white letters on black. “David Duke for State Representative” across the chest with a camouflage-colored ball cap was also popular. The Aryan Nations had called this rally ostensibly to honor Confederate war hero Sam Davis, but the youthful attendees showed a variety of affiliations and allegiances.

A tall, finely featured, bleached blond skingirl, barely out of her teens, adorned her black bomber jacket with multiple patches: Confederate flag, Aryan Nations, and Church of the Creator. One youthful contingent held black shields painted with white SS lightning bolts; another carried a large red flag with a black swastika in the middle. Others kept a more southern fried theme: battle flags on long poles, gray War of Northern Aggression costumes, or shields painted with Confederate bars and crossed hammers, fasces style.

A small group of slightly older Kluxers up from Georgia wore modest blue jeans and Southern White Knights T-shirts. A forty-year-old Oklahoman mixed and matched with a black-and-white swastika pin on his hunter orange ball cap plus a traditional white Klan cross with a red teardrop patch on his jacket. A few other men didn’t mix at all, sticking with brownshirts and swastika armbands.

Half a dozen young men played Praetorian guard, swaggering around the town square with walkie-talkie headsets and “Sam Davis Security”
shirts.
¹
A statue of Sam Davis stood on the town square, much as other memorials remembered rebel soldiers in every county seat of the Old Confederacy. Like the statue in Fort Smith, this one had been erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Davis had been from the local area, Giles County, a war hero hanged at age twenty-one by Union troops certain he was a spy.

A flyer promoting the rally directly linked Confederate war heroes of the distant past with the new generation of skinhead racists then emerging. “In Sam Davis’ veins ran the blood of sacred honor,” the flyers read, “the same sacred honor that ran in the veins of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Col. Travis, Crockett, Bowie of the Alamo, Forrest of the Confederate Calvary [
sic
]—the sacred honor of which our Aryan youth have heard little today.”

Aryan Nations leaders in their forties and fifties, who had organized the rally, were hoping for a bit more than an outdoor history lesson, however. They wanted to recruit skinheads into their shrinking ranks or at least exert some influence over a movement that was growing spontaneously and proving difficult for the established groups to control.

The leadership promised a nighttime party of white power rock bands and a short daytime march around the town square with Louis Beam. Beam, the Vietnam helicopter gunner turned Klansman turned Aryan strategist, had become a movement demigod after the victory at the Fort Smith sedition trial. His reputation and rhetoric endeared him to skinheads, despite the generational gap between them.
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For this occasion, Beam was the image of a plantation aristocrat, wearing an all-white suit with a red rose boutonniere. With three hundred skinheads gathered at his feet on the town square, the short, unimposing Beam swelled into a fire-breathing
Sturmführer
. He claimed a blood right to the soil of the South:

My ancestors lived over here in Franklin, Tennessee. There were ten Beams enlisted in the first Tennessee Confederate Infantry. So I come here not as an outsider . . . to tell you poor dumb southern people how to think about us. You let these carpetbaggers and scalawags come in and run your town . . . You don’t need damn Yankees to tell you what to do . . . My ancestors lived in this state five generations. Four of them died fighting for the Confederacy in the Tennessee army.

At points Beam also sounded like an overexuberant cornpone politician, reveling in the glories of Confederate nationalism.

Sam Davis means so much, so much to me. And I know to you. Sam Davis was brought over here into this courthouse, surrounded by three thousand Yankee soldiers who occupied these streets in 1863 . . . Sam Davis was brought here by these tyrants and despots, and he was brought forward in there and said, if you’ll just tell us, tell us, who gave you the information about the movement of the Yankee army, you can go home Sam. You can go home to your mother, to your sisters, and to your brother. Right here, you stand on holy hollow ground. Sam Davis looked those Yankee tyrants in the face and said if I had a thousand lives I’d give them all right here before I would betray a friend or a confidant.