1SWAMP CREATURE
On January 21, 1989, the day after George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for Louisiana’s eighty-first legislative district. Running as a Republican, he came out ahead of the state party’s preferred candidate, John Treen, brother of David Treen, Louisiana’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. While a majority of the District 81 voters were still registered Democrats, they had overwhelmingly voted for Ronald Reagan and then George H. W. Bush—and were now up for grabs. Republican National Committee staff members went to Louisiana to bolster Treen’s beleaguered campaign and work against Duke. “We will do anything to defeat this man,” the Bush campaign manager and then RNC chief Lee Atwater declared to The Wall Street Journal. The former and current Republican presidents endorsed Duke’s opponent and made advertisements on his behalf, to little avail: Duke would go on to win the runoff a month later and enter the state legislature. Over the next three years, Duke would aspire to higher and higher office. These subsequent campaigns, unsuccessful though they were, garnered Duke an ever-expanding platform for himself and his cause, bedeviled the establishment, and suggested deep structural failures in American society and its political system. But how did Duke, previously an abject failure in both personal and political life, come to defy the direction of his chosen party and represent the crack-up of an old order?
Perhaps Louisiana provided particularly fertile soil for the emergence of a candidate with a neo-Nazi past. Justice Brandeis may have famously called the states “the laboratories of democracy,” but the alluvial plains and dense swampland of the Mississippi Delta were less like a lab than a hothouse or a petri dish of inchoate American fascism. Its history can read like a specimen list of authoritarian regimes: the colonial governorships of the absolutist monarchies of France and Spain ruling by fiat without consulting representative bodies, the regime of planters lording over monstrously brutal sugar plantations, the post-Reconstruction Bourbon oligarchy that took power in an 1877 coup d’etat carried out by a white militia, and shared power with a Tammany-style urban machine in New Orleans. When challenged by the possibility of a Populist Party revolt at the polls in 1896, the Bourbon oligarchy resorted to force and fraud to push it back. In 1898, the Bourbons promulgated a new state constitution, with the express purpose of limiting voting, effectively disenfranchising the state’s entire Black population and a good deal of its whites, too, and instituting a one-party state. As a result of the French heritage, the legal system is literally Bonapartist. In private life, patriarchal domination was inscribed in the state’s Napoleonic Civil Code, which made the man “head and master” of his household and gave him extensive legal authority over his wife. The progressive reformers, who made weak and abortive attempts to clean up corruption and improve the backward conditions, also distrusted democracy, preferring rule by enlightened business interests and professional experts. (John M. Parker, a “progressive” governor who defied the Klan, had once been involved in the lynching of eleven Italian laborers in New Orleans; he never expressed any regret for the act.)
Tyranny coexisted with a certain kind of anarchy. The state’s experiments in antidemocratic rule sat atop a society that was exceptionally underdeveloped and poor as well as extraordinarily fractious and difficult to lead. “Multicultural” before the word existed, Louisiana was a dizzying welter of competing ethnic and regional interests: French South against Anglo North, Catholic against Protestant, white against Black, great sugar planter against small cotton farmer, country against city, immigrant against native, rich against poor, elitist against populist. W.E.B. Du Bois called the state’s politics “a Chinese puzzle” and a “witch’s cauldron of political chicanery.” The cauldron simmered with a constant roil of corruption, lawlessness, and mob violence: in the countryside, slavery was enforced through brutal vigilantism; in the cities, crime was endemic, both in the form of organized gangs and constant random killings; the Reconstruction era witnessed a low-intensity continuation of the Civil War between irregular militias; from the period of 1889 to 1922, three Louisiana parishes led the nation in lynchings. Another former French colony sprang to the mind of one reporter who attempted to capture Louisiana’s fractured, multiethnic political balancing act: it was “of an intensity and complexity … matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.”
In 1928, a new kind of experiment began. “There is no dictatorship in Louisiana,” Huey P. Long said. “There is perfect democracy there, and when you have perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.” After winning the governorship by campaigning in a populist mode against the Bourbon oligarchy’s concentration of wealth and power, “The Kingfish” quickly coordinated the organs of the state to concentrate his own wealth and power. In office, Long marshaled the governor’s vast powers of appointment to build an empire of patronage jobs, sweeping from office the allies of his political opponents and replacing them with his own people. No state office was too petty to serve as an opportunity for rewarding a friend or avenging an enemy, as well as that enemy’s family and friends. With this apparatus in hand, along with his fine-honed talents of personal insult and threat, Huey set himself to pushing through an ambitious legislative agenda: free textbooks for schools, improved funding for state colleges, thousands of miles of paved roads and bridges, and natural gas pipelines into the cities.
Long’s support came from smallholding white farmers and shopkeepers rather than the laboring masses, a fact that would influence who received relief under his regime. His populism made no provision for union protection, child labor laws (he said picking cotton was “fun” for kids), or unemployment insurance. He is famous for his patronage of Louisiana State University, but the football team band received more money than the law school and graduate school combined. Part of the Long legend is that he distinguished himself from other Southern populist demagogues by avoiding race-baiting, but the reality is much less flattering. Jim Crow was such a settled state of affairs in Louisiana that racist demagoguery just had fewer uses. He nixed old-age pensions on the grounds that too much money would go to Blacks. When he reached the United States Senate, he opposed federal anti-lynching legislation. During his governorship, Black voter registration actually declined while white registration rose after the abolition of the poll tax. It’s true that the state’s Black citizens did benefit from some of Long’s program, but their status in Longite Louisiana is perhaps best summarized through his brother Earl’s gimmick of tossing coins to children while campaigning: he said he would give out “a quarter to the white kids and a nickel to the niggers.”
Venality was not Long’s only tool: he availed himself of violence as well. Critics of his regime had to fear the threat of beatings and kidnappings. On two occasions he instituted martial law: once to ensure the outcome of an election in New Orleans and once to put down a revolt of laid-off oil company workers. Distrusting the “lying” press, he created an apparatus of propaganda, replete with radio addresses, sound trucks blaring slogans, and his own newspaper. Huey was a traveling salesman by trade, and the public loved his buffoonish histrionics, cornpone demagoguery, and flamboyant dress. They cheered his vituperative attacks on his enemies and relished his intentional flouting of decorum. Long enjoyed the destruction and humiliation of his enemies, and his people shared in his enjoyment. The rural poor began to look upon Long with religious ardor, flocking in droves to catch sight of a man they compared to an angel or to Jesus himself.
For both his admirers and detractors, the regime Long set up brought to mind fascism. The Communist Daily Worker screeched HUEY LONG IS LOUISIANA’S HITLER. In his 1935 book Forerunners of American Fascism, the liberal journalist Raymond Gram Swing called him a “coming of Hitler or Mussolini of America.” The homegrown fascist Lawrence Dennis concurred, seeing in Long “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader” in America, also writing, “I think Long’s smarter than Hitler, but he needs a good brain trust … He needs a Goebbels.” The furiously antisemitic fundamentalist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith apparently wanted to play that role. After giving encouragement to the efforts of the writer William Dudley Pelley to set up a fascist paramilitary movement with his Silver Shirts, Smith shifted his allegiance to Long, became his chief propagandist and organizer, and slavishly worshipped him, insinuating himself into his inner circle, wearing the man’s old suits, and even allegedly sleeping at the foot of his bed. Even Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—who denied that Long could meaningfully be called “fascist” and wrote that “Huey Long resembled, not a Hitler or Mussolini, but a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Perón”—called Long’s Louisiana “the nearest approach to a totalitarian state the American republic has ever seen.”
Long’s appeal was not limited to Louisiana. His election to the U.S. Senate in 1932 gave him a national platform. As the rest of the country approached the desperate conditions typical of Louisiana, Long launched his “Share Our Wealth” campaign as an alternative to Roosevelt’s New Deal. He traveled from state to state and spoke, gathering large crowds, not just in the rural South, but in every region. Long, with the help of Smith, himself a wildly charismatic orator, encouraged his admirers at each stop to form Share Our Wealth club chapters. These were to be the seeds of a mass movement and the base of a third-party presidential campaign against FDR. Long’s movement also attracted followers of Father Coughlin, the popular radio priest whose social gospel veered sharply toward antisemitism. Its unrealistic program of wealth redistribution would keep private ownership in place but would aid a disappearing Mittelstand: “Where is the middle class today? Where is the corner grocery man, about whom President Roosevelt speaks? He is gone or going. Where is the corner druggist? He is gone or going. Where is the banker of moderate means? He is vanishing. The middle class today cannot pay the debts they owe and come out alive. In other words, the middle class is no more.” Long’s assassination in 1935 dissipated whatever potential the Share Our Wealth movement had as a challenge to Roosevelt.
Long had a pronounced gift for reaching accommodations with moneyed interests even while publicly attacking their rule. Even as he assailed Standard Oil in the press and accused it of trying to depose and assassinate him, he negotiated a compromise with the company: he would rebate most of the tax the company paid if at least 80 percent of the oil at its Baton Rouge refinery was drilled in Louisiana. Many of Huey’s close backers were independent oil producers who would benefit from such a deal. In fact, Long had formed his own company, the Win or Lose Oil Company, to sell and lease state land to oil drillers, an arrangement that would go on to provide hefty profits for descendants of Long and his cronies well into the twenty-first century. “Louisiana had known corruption before Huey Long, but it had never been so gross or so cynical,” one historian writes. “And corruption had never been elevated into a theory for governing a state.”
The fates of oil and populism in Louisiana are inextricably bound together. Black sludge bubbled up to the surface long before it was drawn out. Legend has it that Hernando de Soto, while exploring the lower Mississippi in 1541, was shown oil seeps by Indians and used the tar to caulk his ships; it was not the last time oil would be used to patch the gaps of an unsound vessel in Louisiana. Natural gas burning in the bayous gave rise to the Cajun folklore of feux follets, “fool’s fires,” known elsewhere as will-o’-the-wisps. These eerie glows were thought to be the souls of unbaptized babies or angry avenging spirits that would lure hapless travelers into the swamps never to be seen again. These lights are, in scientific fact, like all fossil fuels, the transmogrified product of death: energy derived from decomposing organic matter. By the early 1990s the legacy of oil had become literally poisonous: thousands of uncapped abandoned oil wells were leaking toxic and radioactive waste into the soil and water.
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It was oil that brought the Dukes to Louisiana. David Hedger Duke, David’s father, originally from Kansas, was an engineer for Royal Dutch Shell who relocated his family to New Orleans after being stationed for a time in the Netherlands. Duke’s father was a deeply conservative Goldwater Republican and a harsh disciplinarian, and his mother was emotionally distant and an alcoholic—probably not such an uncommon childhood of the 1950s and ’60s. Duke was a lonely, unliked child—peers called him “Puke Duke” and refused to play with him. He retreated into books. In 1964, at age fourteen, he got hold of the Citizens’ Council newsletter and showed up at their office.
The Citizens’ Councils were formed across the South in the 1950s to oppose school integration and voter registration. The Greater New Orleans Citizens’ Council was founded by “Judge” Leander Perez, who had been one of Huey Long’s principal lieutenants and vote-getters. (He was so effective at his job that he managed to deliver more votes to Long than there were registered voters in his parish.) Although his patron was assassinated and he was removed from the judicial bench for misconduct, Perez persevered. Dubbed the “Caesar of the Swampland” by the press, he established a dictatorship in Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes for more than fifty years, doling out patronage and pocketing the sulfur and oil wealth from the desperately poor lower Delta parishes. As the civil rights movement rose, he averred that efforts to desegregate the South were ignited by the Jews, who, he said, “were supposed to have been cremated at Buchenwald and Dachau but weren’t, and Roosevelt allowed two million of them illegal entry into our country.” In 1960 Perez whipped up the crowd at a large Citizens’ Council rally in New Orleans, creating a mob that would go on to attack Blacks in the street with knives and clubs. He also built a concentration camp of sorts to intimidate the freedom riders who were coming down to register voters in Plaquemines Parish.
The young Duke was looking for a particular book available at the Citizens’ Council office: Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason: A Yankee View. Putnam had been director of Delta Airlines but left his post to dedicate his life to writing a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1958 he abandoned that project and threw himself into the civil rights battle, penning an open letter to President Eisenhower in opposition to school integration, which gained him an enthusiastic Southern following. In 1961 he expanded his arguments into a pseudoscientific treatise on Blacks’ putative biological inferiority and the dangers of racial miscegenation, targeted at the legacy of the “equalitarian” cultural anthropology of Franz Boas. Duke may not have been merely indulging his own intellectual curiosity: the Louisiana Department of Education made Race and Reason required reading for “select high school and college students.” In his own telling, Duke says he was taught liberal platitudes about integration in school and came to the “truth” only through his own research for a school assignment, but it seems much more likely that his encounter with Race and Reason was through the standard curriculum.
In any case, Duke began to hang out at the Citizens’ Council office and make himself a nuisance to the staff, who took pity on him when they learned of his unhappy homelife. When he showed up with a copy of Mein Kampf and started spouting off antisemitic opinions, members of the council would later say that they were horrified and tried to dissuade him from going full Nazi, but this version of events strains credulity. Leander Perez was hardly quiet about his antisemitism, and Putnam’s Race and Reason posited Franz Boas’s Jewishness as the reason why he had adopted racial egalitarianism.
It does seem true, however, that Duke’s devoted Nazism did not improve his social life. At Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he failed to win friends by playing records of speeches by the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell and showing pictures of corpses in concentration camps that he had in his dorm room, which was decorated with a Nazi flag, a picture of Adolf Hitler, and German World War II propaganda. It was at LSU where Duke began his political career, delivering tirades against the Jews in Free Speech Alley on campus, otherwise home to anti-war and other radical protesters in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Photographs of Duke tramping around campus in his Nazi uniform from this time would prove to be an encumbrance when he later tried to clean up his image for mainstream politics.
Duke’s entire career would be characterized by attempts to simultaneously gain mainstream recognition and respect and be the predominant leader of the fringe, subcultural world of the Klan and neo-Nazism. Until 1989, he would largely fail to accomplish either. In his bid to rebuild the Klan in the 1970s, he attempted its embourgeoisement. He enjoined his lieutenants to avoid saying “nigger” in public with the press present (an exhortation imperfectly heeded even by Duke himself) and to present themselves as a white civil rights organization. Duke preferred to appear in public in a coat and tie rather than the traditional white robes. He permitted women full membership. As was required for recruiting in southern Louisiana, Duke’s Klan also dropped the organization’s traditional anti-Catholicism.
But Duke’s penchant for personal self-promotion alienated his lieutenants and supporters. During a failed state senate campaign, he fought with a deputy over a TV ad he wanted to air that showed him lifting weights in a tank top and short shorts; the dispute eventually led to the deputy’s resignation. At a Klan leadership conference, Duke performed a similar stunt live: a curtain rose onstage revealing a shirtless Duke pumping iron before a crowd of aghast Klansmen.
Equally embarrassing were the pseudonymous books he wrote and attempted to sell. The first, African Atto, was a fake martial arts guide for Black Power militants, written by one “Mohammed X,” that diagrammed various fighting moves to use against white opponents. When confronted about it, Duke claimed that it was designed to be sold through the mail and thereby identify potential enemies for the coming race war; later he tried to pass it off as “satire in the best tradition of Jonathan Swift.” It seems most likely it was part of a misbegotten moneymaking scheme.
It’s difficult to imagine any political purpose for Duke’s other volume, Finders Keepers, a guide to sex and dating for the modern single woman. Written under the pseudonyms Dorothy Vanderbilt and James Konrad, the book advised ladies how to please their men, mostly with stuff cribbed from women’s magazines, equal parts revolting and banal: “Sooner or later, if you truly want to drive your man wild in bed, you should bring him to climax by fellatio. He will love you for it. To him it’s more than just a beautiful sensation, it’s really an expression of caring and concern and pure loving intimacy on your part.” Duke had apparently hoped the book would become a bestseller and solve his financial difficulties, but it was an utter flop and further alienated his lieutenants, who quickly figured out that he wrote it.
Finders Keepers is, in fact, deeply revealing about Duke, and not because it provides some secret key to an underlying sexual pathology that can explain his entire personality. The salient thing about the book is that, as one of his aides said, it was “too hard-core for the right wing and too soft-core for the perverts.” This remark sums up the essence of the Duke phenomenon: he was caught between his desire for publicity and mainstream acceptance and his infatuation with the secretive underworld of extremism. The Klan’s white sheets, mumbo jumbo titles, and rituals were intended to hide the supposedly respectable citizens in its ranks, at the same time providing a mystique and allure to its recruits and delivering ghastly terror to its victims. Electoral politics and public advocacy, with their inherent need for publicity, were in contradiction with the air of secrecy that gave the Klan both its appeal and effectiveness as a terrorist organization. This is why Duke began to receive scorn and mockery from the other, more radical Klan leaders, who never fully bought his tactical preference for politics and understood that real violence and menace, which made the Klan unacceptable in polite society, were at the heart of the entire thing.
Duke’s paradoxical effort to be a public Klan leader was born from a narcissistic personality that couldn’t be satisfied with the rulership of an “invisible empire” and therefore craved public recognition, at the same time still desiring the frisson of ghoulish power that flows from conspiracism, secret societies, and terrorist machinations. This amphibian nature helps to explain both his successes and his failures: he found purchase as the acceptable public face of unacceptable private hatreds and paranoias, but he was always too “soft-core” for the radical vanguard of his own movement even as he was too tainted with the reek of the racist netherworld to fully cross over into the mainstream.
One piece of advice Duke offered in Finders Keepers is notable for having a real echo in his personal life: its exhortation for women to engage in extramarital affairs. In reality, Duke’s compulsive womanizing had begun to put a strain on his relationship with his fellow Klansmen. Duke’s chief adjutant, Karl Hand, left in the late ’70s partly owing to Duke’s philandering ways. In 1991 Hand told Spy magazine, “He had no qualms about putting the make on anyone’s wife or girlfriend, and the flak always came back to me, because I was his national organizer. He was portraying himself as a family man, with his wife and two kids, but at the same time, he was involved in these sexual escapades.” Another Klansmen recalled, “We had to get David out. He was seducing all the wives.”
As a result of these mishaps, Duke and his organization limped through the 1980s. His breakaway lieutenants formed their own Klans, which were monopolizing media attention and attracting more members through their willingness to use violence. Duke’s plan to use the Klan as a vehicle for his political ambitions seemed to be coming to naught, and he made the decision to leave and form a new organization.
In 1979, he created the NAAWP, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a group ostensibly focused on discrimination against whites. But efforts to class up his operation did not succeed. Friends report Duke going from table to table at a Sizzler steak house asking for donations for the NAAWP, paying the bill with what he could scrounge up, and then pocketing the rest. Meanwhile, he would have his daughters share a hamburger to save money. Duke had been accustomed to living off Klan money, and the racist books and cassette tapes sold through the NAAWP were not an adequate substitute; he used the dues and donations to buy and refurbish his home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. Ever eager to burnish his bourgeois image, he adorned the living room with a piano, which he could barely play.
Yet Duke did somehow manage to scrape together the money for plastic surgery. He went to Dr. Calvin Johnson, the top plastic surgeon in New Orleans, to get a nose reduction and chin implant. Then Duke underwent chemical peels to remove wrinkles around his eyes. Around the same time, while paying no income taxes because he claimed he did not meet the threshold, he was showing up in Las Vegas and playing craps for tens of thousands of dollars.
Duke doggedly ran for office, losing again and again. In 1988 he even ran for president on the ticket of the far-right Populist Party activist and Holocaust denier Willis Carto and received 0.5 percent of the vote—but he did not give up. In 1989 he decided to contest the special election for Louisiana House District 81, centered in Metairie. During the 1970s Duke had outlined his political strategy in the Klan organ The Crusader. Running for local office was the first step in the effort to topple Jewish domination: “Because of the Jews’ basic alien nature, the weakest link in his power comes from a national level downward with only its weakest tentacles reaching down to the local community. Local politics, working upwards, is the soft underbelly of their empire.”
There were reasons why District 81 might be a particularly soft target for Duke. First of all, the district, plumped by white flight from New Orleans, was 99.6 percent white, petrified by the specter of Black crime in the neighboring metropolis. Parish residents repeatedly elected the Chinese American sheriff Harry Lee, who ordered his department to stop Black youths in “rinky-dink cars” and proposed barricading the streets that led to New Orleans. In addition, the state’s economic situation had significantly deteriorated during the Reagan years. Always marching to its own beat, Louisiana had economic cycles that were contrapuntal to those of the rest of the country. The state had never suffered through the malaise of the 1970s: high oil prices filled public coffers and kept property and income taxes virtually nonexistent. But while some of America experienced the 1980s as a delirious boom time, Louisiana faced double-digit unemployment, leading the nation. The low price of oil throughout the decade hobbled the state’s relatively generous public spending, just as it had done in another rusting, multiethnic empire: the Soviet Union.
Copyright © 2024 by John Ganz