Blood and Politics (35 page)

Duke had originally hoped to leverage up a Democratic Party bid by picking a high-visibility fight with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. But Jackson emerged as a serious contender, an alternative to the Democratic front-runner, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. And the civil rights activist refused to get in a mud wrestling match with the former Klansman. And in none of the primary states did Duke outpoll Jackson. In Texas, Duke’s second-best primary state, Duke received 8,808 votes. By any count, that was 8,000 more than had ever joined his Texas Klan operation, but Jackson received 433,335 votes—about fifty times more than Duke. The embarrassment was worse elsewhere. Duke had once announced of his prospects in Georgia: “I don’t know if I can win, but I know in this state I can beat Jesse Jackson.”
¹⁷
In the end, however, Duke could not qualify for the state ballot, while Jackson received 247,831 votes.
¹⁸

Despite these constraining factors, Duke purchased a thirty-minute bloc of television advertising time in Louisiana and found himself a base of support, pulling 23,390 votes in that state, more than Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt or Illinois Senator Paul Simon. Although David Duke’s run in the Democratic Party ended with the March 1988 primaries, his vote totals in Louisiana augured a possibly more successful future on a different ticket.
¹⁹

Meanwhile, in Carto’s reassembled Populist Party, few members showed any interest in running for local office. When they did run, they received little financial support and even fewer votes. Instead of focusing on building the party from the bottom up, they fantasized about a mainstream presidential candidate who could build it for them from the top down. Carto still lamented former Congressman Hansen’s rejection of the Populists’ nomination: “No candidate of national stature will abandon either of the two old parties until we have proven that we have something to offer.”
²⁰
So at a national committee meeting in Cincinnati, they asked David Duke to be their candidate. And he said yes.

The party newsletter ecstatically hailed Duke as the “charismatic, articulate
champion of America’s dispossessed majority.”
²¹
When Lieutenant Colonel James “Bo” Gritz (ret.), a POW-MIA champion who had spoken at Liberty Lobby’s convention the previous October, came to Cincinnati and agreed to take the vice presidential nomination, the Populists were thrilled. Alas, Gritz went home, thought about it, and withdrew several weeks later.
²²
Duke, on the other hand, switched seamlessly from a Democrat label to the Populist one.

His rhetoric still used Jesse Jackson as a symbol of white dispossession. But he was no longer running against the civil rights advocate. “Unless we change the immigration rates into America, unless we slow down the welfare birth rate,” he told the Cincinnati meeting, “Jesse Jackson is the future of America.” It was his standard “the United States is becoming a Third World country” speech. “The only all-White country is Iceland and Iceland’s not enough,” he said.
²³

Although issues such as welfare, affirmative action, school integration, and crime had been targets of white racial resentments since before Duke’s days as a Klansman, Duke was less concerned with the economic costs of “welfare dependency” and more concerned with the “welfare birthrate.” When this was paired with “immigration,” he conjured an explicit worry about the threat to the majority status of white people. Duke and other white supremacists predicted a milk chocolate future with low living standards and a declining civilization. They had the milk chocolate part correct.

Immigration had been a movement issue since Duke’s first trip as a Klansman to the California border with Mexico. One of the most widely circulated pieces of propaganda was a map of North America with broad colorful arrows from the South demonstrating the danger of brown and black immigration from Central America and the Caribbean. By railing against immigration during his 1988 campaign, Duke hoped to catalyze a phenomenon already visible in Europe, where France’s Front National campaigned for the immediate expulsion of North African immigrants. The Front National drew four million plus votes in the first round of French elections that March.
²⁴
Its success goaded David Duke and the Populist Party into open imitation. The number one issue on David Duke’s ten-point Populist Party platform was: “Restrict immigration to protect employment for American workers, and to preserve the spirit, the heritage and traditional values of our nation.”
²⁵

Duke also tried blending immigration and welfare with a menu of economic grievances, such as job loss and low wages. This was a slight change of course for Duke. He had long understood race, but the technique of transforming economic grievances into racial resentments was new for him. At first, Duke borrowed heavily from Carto and
The Spotlight
,
which had mastered this art during the farm crisis in the mid-1980s.

Duke’s initial propaganda was clumsy. One of his early newsletters featured a cartoon drawing of farmers singing: “We are the farmers. We built America. We fed the World. But now, for our rights and heritage, there is only one. So, we hope and pray that David Duke will run!”
²⁶
Actually, farmers were praying for higher commodity prices and debt relief, not “heritage and rights.”

In an earlier instance, Duke reacted to a sharp drop in stock market prices with a Carto-like belief that lower prices for IBM shares signaled a reawakening of white people. “Don’t look upon the stock market crash or a currency collapse as being a misfortune for this country,” his newsletter read. “It may be that a disaster of this kind will bring with it the very opportunity white people need to have Majority views examined and permit the education and re-education of our people.”
²⁷

Revolutionaries of every stripe have awaited cataclysms of all kinds to usher in their new orders. Communists, for example, saw the final collapse of capitalism in a declining rate of profit. Aryans had predicted a race war whenever different physiognomies appeared on the same continent. Duke could have been merely restating a piece of revolutionary dogma, but he wasn’t. As the movement matured in the late 1980s, the economic concerns of ordinary white people were increasingly addressed in a new fashion. Duke added calls for tariffs, preserving the family farm, and cleaning up Wall Street to his list of ways to right racial wrongs such as immigration and the “welfare birthrate.”

We must not be afraid to say that we are protectionists, he said. We seek the protection of American industry and jobs, the safeguarding and keeping of American land and property.
²⁸

There is of course a racial edge to this brand of economic nationalism. Willis Carto had drawn the link between racial nationalism and economic nationalism long before. “If the U.S. imports automobiles, steel or any other commodity, it can import labor just as well,” Carto argued. “The movement of entire populations of North Africans to Europe, Caribbean ‘refugees’ to the U.S.; hordes of Mexican and Latin American mestizos to America [is] likely to accelerate in coming years.”
²⁹
Simply put, Carto, Duke, and the Populists opposed the free movement of capital goods because they opposed the free movement of labor.
³⁰

At a Washington State Populist Party convention in July 1988, Duke added international bankers to his enemies list. But he focused on “Zionist” control of the media rather than the banks. He qualified his call to abolish the income tax, which many Christian patriots believed
was unconstitutional, with a more Republican-sounding advocacy of a flat tax. In the end, money issues, such as the Federal Reserve, didn’t matter to Duke if the racial “heritage” of the country was swamped by an uncontrolled black population, nonwhite immigration, and Zionist mind control. In one moment of truth, he told the Washington State Populists that the problem wasn’t just Zionism, but the Jewish religion itself.
³¹

All the rhetorical blather aside, however, the Populists needed to build their party infrastructure and get on the ballot. And on this point Duke was untiring on their behalf. He traveled from one meeting to another in the hopes of creating a real third party. Duke crisscrossed Florida, went to southern New Jersey to speak on the second floor of a grocery store, and stimulated a record number of Populist candidates to run for local offices. Because of Duke’s multiple efforts, the Populist Party did make some organizational gains that year. Yet it still did not cross over the line that separates an ideological sparring partner from a viable third party contender. The party managed to secure ballot status in only twelve states. Even the party’s chairman acknowledged the failure. He had hoped that Populists would go further into the mainstream, “just as the student radicals of the ’60’s went straight into the System.”
³²
But Duke’s campaign had underscored weaknesses that no one person could have fixed. “I truly believe that the major obstacle the Populist Party faces is to overcome the fear so many of us have of immersing ourselves in the political process,” the chairman had predicted. “Until we become involved in electoral politics with regularity, we will remain a non-entity.”
³³

While Duke finished the election year as a Populist Party candidate, a conflict embroiled Pete Peters in a different kind of campaign. Soon after his summer Bible camp ended, city council members in Fort Collins, near the town where Peters’s home church was located, considered a simple question: Would the country’s civil rights laws be extended to cover housing and employment discrimination against gay men and lesbians? Spurred on by the black freedom movement in the 1960s and the wave of feminist organizing that followed, a nascent gay liberation movement had emerged in the 1970s. As the AIDS crisis became an epidemic in the mid-1980s, gay men and lesbians became more public and prominent. Hollywood film stars wore red ribbons to show a sense of solidarity with the AIDS-stricken. Political action committees in Washington, D.C., pressed for federal legislation. Radical local groups staged dramatic protests, including acts of civil disobedience. And annual gay pride parades ranged from outrageous exhibitionism to quiet determination
in the pursuit of change. Pressure built up to add protection based on “sexual orientation” to local ordinances, state statutes, and federal laws. Following the national trend, activists in Fort Collins documented dozens of instances of local discrimination because of sexual orientation. They took their concerns to the city council and asked for statutory protection.

After expert testimony supporting a change in the law, the city attorney drafted the requisite legislation outlawing such discrimination, and the city council appeared ready to pass it. At that point, Pete Peters and his LaPorte Church of Christ mobilized to oppose the measure. Peters and two hundred others attended two different council meetings that summer. They used the scriptures to justify discrimination against homosexuals much the way Mississippi planters had once employed the biblical story of Ham to deny black people their rights. After a hotly contested August meeting, the Fort Collins City Council decided to put the issue on the November ballot for a referendum-style vote rather than pass the legislation themselves.
³⁴

Peters led the opposition to the measure, which included other non-Identity Christians. His church spent more than twelve hundred dollars for radio advertising on a local AM station. He purchased the time like a pro: a ten-second spot that ran ten times a week for forty weeks and one two-hour slot on Monday night for four weeks. He also bought newspaper advertising, and his coalition distributed leaflets door to door. One leaflet threatened an increase in AIDS cases and “boy prostitution” if “pro-homosexual legislation” was passed. Another argued that “gay rights laws” were only the first step to “full social acceptance.” A third leaflet pressed the main opposition point: “Homosexuals’ civil rights are identical to yours. They can vote, seek office, get an education, own property, assemble, worship . . . Do they deserve
special
treatment [emphasis in original]?”
³⁵

These campaign expenditures eventually ran afoul of the Colorado secretary of state, who required that those spending money in an election register as political action committees. Legal proceedings concerning such registration dragged on for years. Peters lost the political money issue in the courts.
³⁶
But he proved successful in the electoral arena, nevertheless. In a high-turnout election the antigay coalition won more than fifteen thousand votes, while the civil rights advocates received only eleven thousand.
³⁷
The “no special rights” argument against protecting gay men and lesbians eventually was redeployed in several higher-profile statewide contests, including a 1992 election in Colorado.

On November 8, 1988, while George Bush soundly defeated Michael Dukakis, Populist Party candidate David Duke eked out a mere forty-five
thousand votes in his run for president. Duke’s time had not yet arrived.
³⁸
His long months as a Democratic candidate and then as a Populist candidate had, nevertheless, turned him into an adept campaigner. He now also possessed a list of willing financial supporters from all over the country. Further, the fight against gay civil rights, like that pursued by Peters, contained a lesson for all white supremacists. If they could find the right propaganda package and an acceptable vehicle for their core ideas, white supremacists too could find mass constituencies, even voting majorities. In the months that followed, David Duke did precisely that.

8 February 1989

Dear Friend,

We are making history in Louisiana.

As an open defender of the rights of White people, I have stunned the media and political establishment by finishing a strong first in the recent election here for representative. In a field of seven candidates, I received 33% of the vote! That was almost twice as many as my nearest opponent, John Treen.

. . .

Our enemies know, perhaps more than anyone else, the potential represented by this campaign for our people’s basic civil rights.

I have addressed the real issues that no other candidate will dare to discuss. I am the only candidate in recent America who has made a major issue out of the anti-white racial discrimination called affirmative action. I am the only one who points out that poverty can never be cured without curbing the welfare illegitimate birthrate. I am the only candidate addressing the true causes of violent crime and the deterioration of our schools and neighborhoods.

There are millions of Americans who talk about these issues every day among their friends and families, but no serious candidate seeking political office has dared to discuss them openly and fearlessly. Until now!

. . .

With your help, February 18th will mark the beginning of a new political era.

   
Sincerely,

   
David Duke.
¹