In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  Although the Great Society did not dramatically alter the foundations of poverty, it was a much better attempt to improve living conditions and public participation for marginalized people than had ever been attempted before, and, arguably, it contributed to the economic growth that many politicians and academics claim was responsible for the decline in poverty.

  The Great Society lifted many people out of poverty, and I am one mayor who remembers. How many more people on the margins might have reached a better place had the programs continued, we don’t know. I saw the changes in New Orleans over the years before Duke began peddling his false version of the past. In the 1980s, Reagan started slashing programs and forced the mayor after my dad, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, to cut city jobs; that loss of revenue, coupled with Louisiana’s recession triggered by the oil slump, took a hard toll across the city. As white-collar families left for work in other cities, the city lost population, dropping under a half million by 1990, more than one hundred thousand less than when my father took office, and pockets of blight reappeared.

  With his sandy hair and trim mustache, David Duke, the born-again Republican, came across as a reasonable conservative, going house to house down Metairie’s manicured streets, politely asking homeowners for their support. He got a boost in mid-January of 1989 when a parade in New Orleans on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday turned violent, with several African Americans teenagers attacking bystanders. As police made arrests and restored order, the TV news footage sent out shock waves. Duke, who had been blaming crime on welfare recipients, began to surge in the polls.

  When the primary ended, Duke had a substantial 33 percent, leading John Treen, a silver-haired stalwart of the state Republican Party, at 19 percent. John is the brother of former governor Dave Treen; he was a contractor and home builder who had long lived in Metairie. WDSU-TV reporter Clancy DuBos discovered that Duke didn’t live in the district; he had taken an apartment there in time for filing. None of that seemed to deter Duke’s momentum; people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Klan meeting embraced his coded message that blacks were the problem—blame the other. Treen was a lackluster campaigner who had had his share of run-ins with a number of Jefferson Parish elected officials; in any local race, you need the support of politicians who have won elections. Duke led the primary but without an absolute majority. Treen entered the runoff with a disadvantage in that sense.

  The election never should have gone the way it did, but in retrospect I realize it was the shape of things to come. John Treen, an honorable man who had served in the military, distributed a four-page tabloid with parallel photographs of Treen in navy whites and Duke in a Nazi outfit at LSU; the campaign flyer also listed a number of Duke’s more outrageously bigoted statements. When reporters confronted Duke for comment, he took the flyer, held it, and tore it in half, saying: “This is character assassination!” Great video—Tear up those lies! Fake news! Duke reduced damning evidence to a clever sound bite. The local media did little investigation of Duke’s history with hate groups beyond calling him “a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.” Duke’s history did, though, become an issue for the Republican National Committee in Washington.

  In a remarkable twist for an off-season state legislative race, President George H. W. Bush and former President Reagan endorsed John Treen—both of them clearly concerned about a hate merchant like Duke gaining an electoral platform as a newborn Republican. George W. Bush, not yet governor of Texas, made a campaign appearance for John Treen. Archbishop Philip Hannan and Loyola president Father James Carter, S.J., sent out letters expressing reservations about Duke, without actually crossing a political line to endorse Treen. African American leaders kept a muted distance, not wanting to attack Duke in a district that was 99.6 percent white, lest his counterattack make more of the issue of race than he had already done.

  On election night, Duke won by 227 votes, at 50.7 percent, and the news went all over the world: former Klan Grand Wizard wins in Louisiana. At the victory party, in a Lions Club on Metairie Road, the mood was both elated and bellicose. Channel 4—WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate—dutifully ran video of a man cupping his mouth and bellowing several times, “Channel Four—Communist!” Cheryl and I can still recall the feeling of shock and disbelief we had as we watched the election results come in that night.

  At a press conference the next day, Duke tried to put some distance between today and his long record as an anti-Semite, saying, “I have a hand of friendship out to the Jewish community.” But when reporters began pressing him on the items sold by the NAAWP News, liked taped speeches of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, he ended the conference, saying he wasn’t going to “discuss what I did ten years ago.”

  And so David Duke came to Baton Rouge to take his seat in the legislature. He posed a huge problem for many of us who were only a year into our terms. Black caucus members were outraged by his mere presence. Democrats were stunned that someone of his ideological ilk had won.

  The Republicans were in their own pickle. Duke had been a Democrat, on paper at least, until a few weeks before the election. Many Republicans saw him as a slick operator of calculated expediency, but very few wanted to speak out against him.

  In those early weeks and months, all of us in the state legislature had a decision to make: attempt to work around our newly elected colleague or build a resistance and push back. Odon “Don” Bacqué, a newly elected Independent whose district included part of Lafayette, the hub city of Cajun country, researched state law and found that the statute required a candidate to be domiciled for a year in the district. I helped him circulate a copy of the statute, hoping we could have Duke removed on legal grounds. “Laws without enforcement are only empty promises,” Bacqué declared. “Edmund Burke said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

  The House Speaker, popular with the members, argued that the people in Metairie had “elected Mr. Duke by a majority vote”—and therefore the people’s will should be respected. He called for a vote to table Bacqué’s motion, which carried 69–33. I sat there thinking about my father being threatened by Leander Perez and Willie Rainach, both long buried, and then about images of Auschwitz, the stacks of eyeglasses and suitcases of the dead, while another realization bore down on me from the comments of several colleagues—that people in their districts liked Duke. Others had been so mesmerized by his style as to say, “You know, he’s kinda got a point. He doesn’t yell and scream. He’s just talking about people working, and personal responsibility, and babies not having babies—you know, an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” I heard people in the chamber mutter things like that, and kept replying, “He’s not telling you what he really thinks.”

  Duke arrived with his agenda on the table. He was building a base by telling white people that black people were the cause of Louisiana’s problems, or of their losing ground, or being poor. I began to push my colleagues, telling them, “He wants to cut programs that will help poor white people in this state—health care, education, unemployment compensation.” In New York, the Anti-Defamation League began distributing a brochure called David Duke: In His Own Words. It showed how obsessed he was with race as biological determinism and willfully perverted history:

  Jews gain certain advantages by promoting the Holocaust idea. It inspires tremendous financial aid for Israel. It makes organized Jewry almost immune from criticism. Whether the Holocaust is real or not, the Jews clearly have a motive for fostering the idea that it occurred. . . . I question whether 6 million Jews actually died in Nazi death camps. [Interview with Hustler magazine, reprinted in NAAWP News, August 1982]

  In an earlier publication from the Anti-Defamation League, David Duke: A Bigot Goes to Baton Rouge, a fund-raising letter distributed by the NAAWP quotes Duke:

  No issue is more important than our people preserving its identity, culture, and rights. An America ruled by a ma
jority of Blacks, Mexicans and other Third World types will not be the America of our forefathers, or the kind of nation for which they struggled and sacrificed. [1986 fund-raising letter]

  It sounded a whole lot like “Make America Great, Again.”

  A group of us decided that the most important thing we could do, short term, was make sure that not a single motion by Duke became law. We held hard to that position and won; but the battle was long, draining, and often dispiriting, just as it has been for millions of Americans appalled at Donald Trump’s shameful disdain for the truth and his own bizarre behavior.

  In Louisiana, we learned with Duke that demagoguery is hydra-headed, like the Greek monster with many faces and, therefore, many masks. As Michael D’Antonio reports in the biography Never Enough, Donald Trump in 1989 eerily echoed Duke’s notion of black privilege, saying: “If I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black because they have an actual advantage.” With Duke, my colleagues and I learned that you have to dig in and keep challenging a demagogue’s lies; in time, truth rises with a power of its own.

  * * *

  —

  On most days during a legislative session, reporters casually follow the major bills as they move through hearings at committees, and you’d expect to see a few of the sponsors, and opponents, quoted in the news. Overnight, reporters from faraway places who had never set foot in Baton Rouge showed up to do reports on Duke. National TV interviews, with mostly soft questions from anchors or talk-show hosts who didn’t do the hard reading about his past, allowed him to cast himself as a maverick and a celebrity. Men and women seated in the legislature watched this flood of attention with dread and a certain envy. Who wouldn’t want the spotlight he was getting?

  With all this free publicity, he became a kind of folk hero overnight. Imagine what it felt like to many legislators who lived far from the New Orleans area, watching Duke sit at his desk in the House, opening up envelopes with checks from people all over, and notes presumably urging him on. One letter was simply addressed “Duke, Louisiana.”

  I decided to be pragmatic and establish some form of contact, regardless of our glaring moral differences, while working resolutely to thwart his agenda. We had a conversation, and for the first half hour or so he came off as reasonable, a guy with a vote who might do the conventional horse-trading we all did in getting a given measure passed into law. But as the conversation went on, his eyes ranged away from direct contact and he started talking about the biological differences between the races, and the need to separate the races, that blacks would be better off in other countries. It was chilling.

  Again, I could not stop thinking of Auschwitz. I remembered my prayers from that day and the commitment I made to stand up against this sort of evil. We must not let this happen again.

  Here was a closet Nazi, sowing the seeds of new bigotry in Louisiana, while soft-pedaling his repulsive record toward Jews and blacks, pulling in money from people who saw him as standing up for the underdogs.

  I set out to act as a foil to the hatred of Duke and to attack his veneer of respectability. In every interview I gave, I made clear that not all white people in Louisiana or the South shared the twisted beliefs of Duke. He “doesn’t care about equal rights for everybody,” I told Iris Kelso of the Times-Picayune. “He cares about creating a white Christian nation, with no room for anybody else. He understands that if he said that stuff, he’d sound like the kook that he really is.” In public meetings and at political rallies, I was more direct: “David Duke is a pathological liar.”

  Duke’s popularity created a moral vacuum in Louisiana. Into the breach stepped an uncommon man, the Reverend James Stovall, a white Methodist minister from Baton Rouge. Jimmy Stovall saw Duke for what he was and began organizing a countermovement. Jane Buchsbaum, a New Orleans Jewish activist, joined the group, which called itself the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. Lance Hill, who was working on a doctorate in history at Tulane, had done research on the Klan and the NAAWP; he became director of the Louisiana Coalition. Historian Lawrence N. Powell of Tulane and New Orleans author Jason Berry also became active. But the person in the Coalition who had the most striking impact on public opinion, and on me, was Elizabeth Rickey.

  A thirty-two-year-old graduate student in political science at Tulane, Beth Rickey was a member of the Republican State Central Committee. She was from Lafayette. Her father had served as an army lieutenant colonel under General George C. Patton in World War II. She was an old-school Eisenhower Republican, the kind that today’s party could sorely use.

  Beth Rickey and Lance Hill had done the research for John Treen’s campaign flyer that Duke had torn up in front of the cameras, calling it “lies.” By the time Duke won, Beth and Lance had done more extensive research on his ties to hate groups. Beth Rickey came by her party credentials through a family tradition, one that I respected. Her courage transcended politics. Interestingly, she was the niece of Branch Rickey, the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who integrated major-league baseball when he signed Jackie Robinson in 1947.

  After Duke’s victory, when she learned that he was going to Chicago to speak to a gathering of the Populist Party—the neofascist organization on whose ticket he had run for president the previous fall—Rickey jumped on a plane, went to the Chicago hotel, and giving her best Southern smile, managed to get herself past the goonlike security people carrying a hidden tape recorder. “The mood in the room was tense,” she wrote later. “The speakers were all angry—angry about minorities, angry about the media, just plain angry.”

  An exultant Duke took the podium. “We did it!” After the explosion of applause and yells, he said: “My victory in Louisiana was a victory for the white majority movement in this country.” The crowd chanted Duke! Duke! Duke! He continued: “Listen, the Republican Party of Louisiana is in our camp, ladies and gentlemen. I had to run with that process, because, well, that’s where our people are.” As the crowd, mostly male, including skinheads and men in Klan T-shirts, thundered their approval, Beth Rickey slipped away, nervous and scared. She wanted to be out of there as quickly as possible. As Duke left the conference room, he shook hands with Art Jones, vice-chairman of the American Nazi Party, just as a television reporter closed in. Jones shoved the journalist, calling him “a low-life scumbag.”

  When the footage aired in Louisiana, the Republican National Committee in Washington was putting pressure on the state party to oust Duke from their fold. Duke apologized to the legislature in a statement, claiming that he had spoken to a “conservative, anti-tax” rally. But lying is like a helicopter whose wings must keep spinning to maintain altitude.

  Beth Rickey was determined to show the world that David Duke was a fraud.

  As we got to know each other—a Republican state committeewoman and a Democratic state representative—I found her an affable, open person who thrived on politics, yet was jittery about the drama that soon engulfed her as a party loyalist turned voice of conscience. Duke was beyond anything she had encountered before. But having seen the hatred of certain white people up close since childhood, and ever aware of that vein of anger as my life took its course, I could pick up the vibes or expressions of people who hated my father or me, and steel myself to keep moving on what I believed. Beth Rickey was getting a baptism by fire.

  I used the information from Rickey and her colleague, Lance Hill, in speeches and statements; yet as I watched the groundswell build behind Duke, I knew we were in for a long haul. We all wanted to expose Duke and get his white base to see him for what he was, but his charisma and telegenic appeal, with so much TV news coverage facilitating his makeover, meant that his base was growing.

  Donald Trump harvested priceless free cable coverage of his primary speeches, casting himself as the great deal maker who would restore a fallen America. Encouraging people in stadiums to beat up protesters, he projected a strongman persona. Wh
en Duke endorsed him, Trump was forced by the media to finally, if halfheartedly say, “I disavow” Duke. Did Trump’s white nationalist supporters believe that? Trump cultivated the part of his base that conventional Southern conservatives would never go near, like when he said there were “good people on both sides” after the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a young woman was killed by a zealot plowing through the crowd in a car.

  Back in 1989, as I drove past the lush greenery along the interstate, making the eighty-mile return to New Orleans with my wife and infant daughter, I wondered what it would take before the white people who liked Duke finally saw through him. We were trying to get people to see that the past mattered, that Southerners long before our day had subjugated African Americans so ruthlessly, while Duke seized on embedded fears and hostility.

  How do you try to course-correct history, confront the past, and change how people think? That was the root issue entwined with David Duke, who denied his past to cast himself as a newborn Republican. He did so by lying, as I said often in interviews—lying about his own past, lying about history, telling historical lies to sell books and sell himself. My father had dealt with die-hard racists as mayor. The language people used had softened in the decades since then, but as I watched a resurgent white supremacy in 1989, I wondered how bad it would get.

  In May 1989 Beth visited the legislative “office” in the basement of Duke’s suburban house, outside the district, which doubled as NAAWP headquarters. She purchased The Turner Diaries, an apocalyptic novel by a Nazi apologist about a race war, which the Anti-Defamation League called a blueprint tract by the Order, an underground terrorist group that assassinated Alan Berg, a liberal Denver talk-radio host, in 1984. Also on sale was Hitler Was My Friend and The Myth of the Six Million.