Blood and Politics (47 page)

All the lights were on and all the buttons pushed when he seamlessly
switched from freshman state legislator to candidate for the United States Senate in 1990 and then for governor in 1991. Like the White League more than a hundred years before, David Duke’s conjoined campaigns almost pushed Louisiana to the breaking point.

In the Senate race the seat was held by Bennett Johnston, a wily oil business Democrat first elected to the Senate during the Nixon landslide of 1972. To oppose Johnston, the Republican Party officially nominated a mainstream conservative state senator at a convention in January 1990. Party leaders hoped to push Duke out of the race, and he had received only 52 of the 792 delegate votes.
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Duke decided, however, not to accede to the leadership and seemed to understand intuitively that his Republican opponent was a weak candidate. While anyone could imitate Duke’s rhetorical attacks on affirmative action and minority set-asides, it soon became apparent that a majority of white voters liked the real thing.

Duke’s Senate campaign began with rallies in the northern end of the state, far from his legislative district in Metairie. He drew 1,000 people in Bossier City, outside Shreveport, and 750 people in Monroe. Just days later in Lafayette 500 attended. The same number showed in Baton Rouge.
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At each rally Duke’s charismatic presence and rhetorical skills swept away any doubts that he was a statewide contender.

In the first three months of 1990, Duke the candidate registered $575,305 in contributions with the Federal Election Commission, and the totals grew significantly through the summer months. By July he had eclipsed his principal Republican opponent in the opinion polls, despite repeated declarations by national Republican leaders that Duke was an unwelcome intruder. As the October primary neared, the party leadership began to panic. Louisiana’s nonpartisan primary system, first created to ensure the supremacy of a whites-only Democratic Party, now worked to Duke’s advantage. Democrats, Republicans, and candidates of any other nominal stripe all competed against one another in one primary election. Duke could pull from blue-collar Democrats and Republicans at the same time. If one candidate did not win an absolute majority in this first election, a runoff was held four weeks later. A runoff could turn into a short but fevered event. Having lost all hope of defeating the sitting senator, Democrat Bennett Johnston, Republicans nationally hoped to spare themselves the embarrassment of Duke’s representing their party in a high-profile postprimary runoff. Eight Republican senators endorsed Johnston.
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On October 6, 1990, Senator Bennett Johnston received 752,902 votes, 54 percent of the total, to Duke’s 607,391, or 44 percent. There was no need for a runoff. In conventional terms, Duke had been routed.
At the same time, he received almost 59 percent of the white vote and carried twenty-five of the state’s sixty-four parishes, including Jefferson Parish, one of the wealthiest and best educated. He won every parish in the Fifth Congressional District save two. His support ran from the white Protestant piney woods north of Baton Rouge to the ethnically diverse and Catholic southern half of the state, making him Louisiana’s most successful Republican statewide candidate.
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Moreover, he had raised and spent approximately two million dollars that year, a respectable sum by any standard; but a particularly large amount compared with the budgets of his white supremacist colleagues. Only Willis Carto raised and spent more each year.
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Duke could justifiably claim to have emerged from the election as the spokesman for a majority of Louisiana’s white people.

Nevertheless, Carto’s
Spotlight
tabloid ignored Duke’s success, drowning a one-line comment on the Louisiana election in an ocean of ink otherwise devoted to the crisis then looming in the Persian Gulf. Even the small-time eat-and-greet Liberty Lobby conference in D.C. received more coverage. It was an odd twist in a relationship that dated back to the first editions of Carto’s tabloid in 1975, when it had favorably covered Duke as an up-and-coming Klan leader. Perhaps Carto sensed that Duke had already outgrown
The Spotlight
constituency and no longer needed a boost. William Pierce’s
National Vanguard
magazine, for its part, never did get around to mentioning the Senate race. Running for office carried little immediate import for him. Otherwise, while Louisiana wrestled with itself like an alligator chasing its own tail, the rest of the country focused on the coming war with Saddam Hussein.

During the last week of January 1991, Duke virtually ignored American tanks crashing into Iraq. He shaped his own battle plans instead, as he switched from the Senate race to a campaign for governor without so much as a change of suits. On the first floor of 550 North Arnoult in Metairie, volunteers stuffed seventeen thousand letters to non-Republican supporters, urging them to register with the party.
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Only as Republicans would they be able to vote for Duke delegates to the state convention.

For their part, state Republican officials once again tried to outmaneuver Duke, rather than confront him directly. The sitting governor, Charles “Buddy” Roemer III, a Democrat about to switch registrations at the behest of President George H. W. Bush, ignored Duke completely. Roemer considered himself the odds-on favorite in the coming
election, but his relationship with the state party leaders remained sour, at best. They decided to back a conservative evangelical Christian, Congressman Clyde Holloway, and planned a convention to name him rather than Roemer or Duke. They pinned their hopes on the convention as a way of avoiding the havoc Duke had caused in the party the year before. (Meanwhile, Edwin Edwards, a former Democratic governor, twice indicted for corruption but not yet ever convicted, aimed at confounding the odds and winning back the spot in the Baton Rouge mansion.)
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Against the party’s official machine, Duke assembled his own engineers and skilled craftsmen. They set schedules, turned raw materials into workable tools, and maintained the power grid. A circle of shop floor veterans established departments, enforced labor discipline, and instructed the rank and file. The machinery wheezed and groaned, but it sputtered on for six months with one goal in mind: winning delegates to the Republican state convention that June. Volunteers worked the phones from computerized lists to mobilize known activists for areawide meetings. Slates of Duke delegates were drawn up district by district, and a leader, who functioned much like a legislative whip, was selected for each district. Then, in the days before the actual party caucuses, volunteers again made calls, this time urging supporters to attend the caucuses and vote for a slate of delegates committed to Duke. A half hour before the caucuses started, Duke’s supporters met, and the whips received the list of delegates designated by central command.
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Despite months of aggressive computer list phone calling, at the end of caucus day Duke received only 160-plus designated votes. By contrast, Congressman Holloway won 3,170 delegates in the caucuses, plus the promise of an additional 150 state party officials with automatic voting rights.
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Because Holloway and the leadership secured a larger number of delegates, they mistakenly believed their political machine had beaten the former Kluxer’s. But they didn’t understand Duke’s campaign operation any better than they fathomed the depth of popular support for Duke himself. When the party convened on June 14 in the Lafayette convention center, Duke decided to make a splash big enough to ensure that his campaign could not be ignored.

Convention rules required that anyone whose name was officially placed in nomination had to pledge in advance his or her unconditional support for the official nominee. The rules worked against Duke, who did not have enough delegates to win the nomination and was loath to give his support to anyone else. The same was true for Buddy Roemer, the sitting governor and recent Republican convert. Neither man planned to drop out of the race or take the pledge. Therefore, they each decided
not to officially enter themselves into nomination. Instead, Duke and Roemer both instructed their delegates to vote no endorsement, as a way of forestalling Holloway’s formal selection.
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At the same time, Duke thought that he had a deal with party officials that would allow him ten minutes at the convention podium. That was all he really wanted: a chance to get a minute on the local news broadcasts around the state. At the last minute he discovered that in fact there was no deal. As word came back that he would not be allowed to speak, tension built inside the Duke camp.

At a side caucus, Duke assembled his delegates. At the appropriate moment, he told them, launch a loud and noisy convention floor demonstration that would force officials to allow him to speak. All 180 brimmed with excitement. They were going to get a little chance to fight after all. The moment finally came when Duke’s campaign manager was formally recognized to make a short speech supporting no endorsement. Instead of making a speech, the manager quickly tried to cede his time to David Duke. When Duke was ruled out of order, his delegates broke into prolonged pandemonium, chanting, clapping, and disrupting the proceedings for a half hour. Duke egged them on by dashing past the sergeant at arms and onto the stage, although not to the podium. Ultimately, the demonstration failed to force Duke to the platform at that moment.
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After he had been officially elected the party’s nominee, however, Congressman Holloway asked Duke to make a few remarks. It was the first in a long line of Chamberlain-like appeasements that ultimately doomed Holloway’s candidacy. The demonstration was instant proof that Duke was willing to break the rules and that the party lacked the will to stop him. He got the publicity he wanted from the convention. And his machine was fierce, loyal, and capable. Duke had founded fierce and even loyal organizations before, but this was the first to be genuinely capable. Contrasted with the gaggle of warring Klan factions or the schismatic Populist Party, Duke’s campaign machinery purred like a twentieth-century assembly line compared with a seventeenth-century blacksmith’s shop. Finally, the “white political machine” he had envisioned in his first Klan newsletter almost twenty years before was up and running.

If his Republican operation ran qualitatively better than his Populist campaign, it was not due to any change in Duke himself. He was still an organizational oaf, charismatic and charming for the public, but little concerned with the volunteers and activists who made the calls and stamped the envelopes. Duke had neither the temperament nor the skills to actually manage a complex mechanism.
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The difference was
the paid staff and volunteers he had gathered to run it. At headquarters in Metairie, top campaign jobs remained in the hands of the tough ex-cops who had run his legislative election unburdened by a direct connection to the Klan. A few veteran national socialists worked quietly behind the scenes. Longtime movement personalities served as regional coordinators in Shreveport, Bogalusa, and Baton Rouge. At the same time, a new generation of activists functioned as both paid staff and volunteers. They kept the New Orleans headquarters on track, managing volunteers, tending databases, and handling media calls. One campaign staffer even contributed articles to Duke’s noncampaign tabloid, the
NAAWP News
.
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The line separating Duke’s campaign committees from the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), not always sharp at the start, blurred further through each successive election cycle. The NAAWP was a nonprofit corporation, not a political action committee, but its solicitations sometimes asked for support for Duke as a candidate. At headquarters it wasn’t always clear to volunteers whether they were working in space belonging to NAAWP or the election committee. And as the campaigns grew to crusadelike proportions, the NAAWP grew as well—at least initially.
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The campaign structure—with its mix of hard-core cadres and first-time volunteers—proved that Duke was developing a new mid-level rank of activists with skills beyond the ability to wrap a wooden cross in burlap and set it on fire. This was most true among Generation Xers. Young Republicans at Northwestern State University sponsored Duke’s first Senate campaign speech at a college. The campus chapter also voted to endorse him, despite the state party’s official nomination of someone else.
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Similarly, at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, the Kappa Delta Theta fraternity made Duke an honorary member, and a campus rally attracted five hundred. If Duke had run with a Populist tag, these kinds of endorsements would have eluded him. It was slightly different at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, where a White Student Union formed to support Duke. In that case, the Republican label would have mattered less. But with just a few exceptions, the young people signing up for Duke’s Senate campaign would have been unlikely candidates for either the Klan or the skinhead scene. Walking into a semipublic office and stuffing envelopes or making phone calls on behalf of a charismatic state representative whom you had just seen on the television news the night before was a fundamentally different experience from secreting yourself away in a subcultural hangout. Nevertheless, both skinheads and young Duke volunteers shared a common generational experience. They had
been born in the years after legal segregation, and their experience of “whiteness” was inherently more problematic than it had been for their parents and grandparents at a similar age. Not everyone in the society around them assumed that being “American” meant being “white.” Instead, the United States of America had started to take on the aspect of a multiracial democracy, as black people voted, ran for public office and served in Congress. Not everyone assumed that white males should be the only ones talking or running the place. There was also something testosteronic in this young constituency. A poll commissioned that summer by Duke’s opponents showed his support to be higher among young white males than among white women.
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