A Master Racist Jumps Parties to Land in the Louisiana Legislature

David Duke’s election to the Louisiana Legislature casts a shadow over the whole political landscape.

The Republican Party has been humiliated by the victory of a 38-year old former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who defeated GOP loyalist John Treen by 224 votes. Duke had registered Republican just before the race and his triumph is an embarrassment at a time when GOP Chairman Lee Atwater and others are trying to attract black voters.

American journalism also lost. Duke humbled the media by putting distance between himself and ideas he had advocated for 20 years, using local TV news to orchestrate the image of a sleek conservative.

Reporters focused largely on the Klan connection, one Duke claims he left in 1980. They let him skirt a larger issue: Duke’s belief in the theory of a master race and his current neo-Nazi links. The result was inadequate public information.

The election was also a loss for the city. A 99.6% white suburb voted its fury against next door New Orleans, with its black voting majority and a recent wave of black homicides; several street battles broke out this year after the Martin Luther King Jr. Day march. Duke also enjoyed a strange climate of historical amnesia suffered by his potential enemies during the campaign: Black leaders showed profound apathy and Jewish leaders said little, apparently afraid to raise emotional temperatures in middle-class Metairie.

An ideological virus pulsing with anti-Semitism has worked its way into the body politic, finally gaining an elected seat after nearly a decade of campaigning. In 1983, Duke’s one-time ally in the KKK, Tom Metzger of Fallbrook, Calif., left the Klan after having won the 1980 Democratic primary in a San Diego congressional district with 33,000 votes. Metzger, who led patrols to keep Mexican immigrants out and advocated marksmanship classes in schools, was eventually trounced by former Rep. Clair Burgener in the general election, but his primary victory proved that a political opening existed.

That same year, a former Nazi Party leader in North Carolina, Harold Covington, received 43% of the vote in a losing race for attorney general--running as a Republican.

Late last November, Duke embarked on twin campaigns. One was the Statehouse election designed to soften his racist image--the “new” Duke in quest of political acceptability. The other was an ideological extension of his 1988 presidential try on the Populist Party ticket.

Launched in 1982, the Populist Party is the brainchild of Robert Weems, a Jackson, Miss., leader of Klan resurgence, and Willis A. Carto of Torrance, Calif. The party is scheduled to have a convention in Chicago, March 4-5, with David Duke as a speaker. The new Populists, like the new Duke, take labels loosely. The original Populists of the 1890s were farmers who rebelled against escalating rural credit and railway freight rates; it was a grass-roots movement of cooperative marketing and purchasing outlets. The farmers forged ties with urban trade unions, creating the People’s Party, otherwise known as Populists. By the early 1900s, the movement had expired.

A strain of anti-Semitism did mark early populism but it was not a dominant characteristic. Carto glorified that strain. In 1955 he founded the Liberty Lobby in Washington, which the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai Brith considers “the most active anti-Semitic organization in the country . . . a multimillion-dollar operation.” Another Carto spinoff, the Institute for Historical Review, has argued that the Nazi Holocaust is a hoax. Several years ago, IHR offered $50,000 if anyone could “prove” the existence of Nazi death camps. A Jewish survivor collected $90,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

In 1985, Duke reportedly twice met with Carto in California. As early as 1970, he seemed to share some of Carto’s sympathy for the Third Reich. As an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, Duke put on a uniform with swastika to protest a speech by attorney William Kuntsler and carried a sign saying “Gas the Chicago 7”--Kuntsler’s clients. Last month Duke called that incident “a lark . . . something I now regret.”

In 1980, he wrote a “Dear Patriot” letter to fellow Klansmen, calling the Holocaust a hoax, “perpetrated on Christians by Jews.” Soon thereafter he left the Klan and formed the National Assn. for the Advancement of White People. Today, Duke calls the NAAWP “a civil-rights organization,” stressing that it has nonprofit IRS status.

Lance Hill, a Tulane University doctoral candidate in history, has followed the NAAWP News during the decade. Hill says “the contrast between Duke’s campaign persona and his activist ideology can largely be attributed to his belief in the strategic necessity of political deception. In 1984 the NAAWP News observed that since the public still regarded white supremacy as immoral, racist activists should conceal their opinions and ‘never refer to racial superiority or inferiority, only talk about racial differences, carefully avoiding value judgments.’ ”

The same year, the News reprinted an article from Instauration--an avowedly anti-Semitic publication--advocating segregation of ethnic Americans in geographic zones. All Jews would live in Manhattan and Long Island, renamed West Israel, blacks would live in the gulf South, renamed New Africa, and Latinos in a strip of the Southwest, renamed Alta California.

On Feb. 3, when James Gill of the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote a scathing column about that plan, Duke said that the News published controversial articles with which he himself did not always agree.

The current issue of Instauration features an interview with Duke conducted in December. “I came to understand,” he says, “that the most universal element in the well-being of any society is the biological quality of the people. I learned that once the gene pool was damaged, all hope and promise for the future would be lost irretrievably.”

NAAWP News advertises mail-order books of raw anti-Semitism. Duke’s own booklet, “Who Runs the Media?”--four copies for $3--purportedly documents “Zionist control of America’s mass media.” The News also sells tapes of the late George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

The day after his election, Duke announced: “I have a hand of friendship out to the Jewish community.” But when reporters from the national and local media began pressing him on his Nazi ties and his support for the Holocaust hoax theory, Duke refused to discuss “what I did 10 years ago” and abruptly halted the news conference.

Last spring, running for President first as a Democrat, Duke bought TV spots in Louisiana and won 23,000 votes on Super Tuesday--more than Bruce E. Babbitt and Paul Simon. In Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas he won 18,000 more. Then he jumped to the Populist Party, announcing: “The one primary issue before us is whether our heritage and our way of life, our very bloodline, is preserved in this nation.” Duke received 42,778 votes in 11 states last November. His Populist campaign director was Ralph Forbes of Arkansas, a former captain in Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.

Duke’s links to Carto, the Liberty Lobby or master racism never became an issue in the February election. Reports tagged him “a former Klansman”--ignoring the rest. That Duke’s name and address appear on the list of “support organizations” published in the newsletter of the New Order--a Milwaukee-based Nazi movement--never surfaced as a campaign issue.

One man who tried to pin down Duke’s past was Mordechai Levy, leader of the radical Jewish Defense Organization in New York. He spent five days in New Orleans in early February: Treen attacked him as an outside agitator and the media cast him as a spoiler. Duke called Levy “a terrorist.” Levy’s presence created a swell of anger in Metairie; so did Treen endorsements from Ronald Reagan and President George Bush. “Outside interference”--the old segregationist war cry during the civil-rights era--surfaced anew, helping Duke.

Not until the day before the election did the Times-Picayune report Duke’s relationship with Forbes, in an article omitting reference to Carto and the impact of Liberty Lobby. That same day, a media blunder after the noon news played into Duke’s hands. WWL, the CBS affiliate, telecast a statement by Phil Johnson, a portly, often eloquent editorialist; without endorsing Treen, Johnson cautiously warned voters about Duke’s past.

Duke immediately demanded equal time. Johnson refused. Duke attorneys threatened a protest with the Federal Communications Commission. The station, after conferring with its attorneys, decided to grant the equal time. Then, on the 5 p.m. news on election eve, Duke went on the air endorsing himself, saying the FCC had forced WWL’s hand. “We never spoke to the FCC,” says Johnson.

The next night at Duke’s campaign reception, I circulated among his supporters before the vote count. Besides locals, people had come from Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida and other parts of Louisiana. I have never seen such raw anger.

“Phil Johnson is a communist!” one man yelled. “Jews control the media!” shrilled others. For 30 minutes three men regaled me, insisting that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Then Duke came to the podium, beaming. “I don’t think there’s ever been a candidate more lied about and hurt than I was,” he said. Then he promised that more candidates like him will be coming forward, “across this state, across the Southland and the country.”

Duke, with his blond hair, dark mustache and articulate delivery, was as cool as the other side of the pillow--a perfect media candidate.