In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  Some of the wealthier homes had private guards, but they rarely kept us out; but boy, watch out if you interrupt a cocktail hour! I would regularly call my dad with an update on how things were going. He would wax nostalgic about his early years of campaigning, and how he always stopped in neighborhood bars to shake hands and meet voters. Several times I wanted to say, “But, Daddy, that was twenty-eight years ago.” Little did I know.

  There was of course no Internet in 1979, or social media, but TV and radio spots were overtaking the folkways of retail campaigning, sad to say. My father kept suggesting that I make sure to go into neighborhood bars. I ignored him. He kept bearing down on me—Go into those bars! So finally I did, a corner barroom that had been a watering hole for the same guys for the last fifty years. Lots of cigarette smoke. Bottles of beer lined up on the bar. You get the picture. I sidled up to one old-timer and said, “Hi, my name is Mitch Landrieu. I’m running for state representative and I sure would like your vote!” The guy glared at me. “I hate your father. He ruined the city when he gave it over to the blacks. I would never vote for you.”

  I learned a valuable lesson that day: Never campaign in a barroom full of drunk guys who hate Landrieus. That night I talked to my dad, told him I had hit a few bars, and that we were doing great. I never campaigned in a barroom again. I won that election, winning the primary by 51 votes, and my political career began.

  CHAPTER 3

  David Duke and Donald Trump, a Nightmare Loop

  The Louisiana State Legislature occupies the main floor of the Louisiana State Capitol Building, a thirty-four-story office tower, distinguished by Art Deco design, built in the early 1930s under Governor Huey P. Long. The building houses various state offices and looms like a monolith over scenic lakes, the Governor’s Mansion, and downtown Baton Rouge, all along the Mississippi River. The Capitol is awe-inspiring for its size and beauty, not to mention the Huey Long statue, looking defiant, out on the lawn lined by oak trees. In that majestic building, I remembered how my father had been threatened in 1960 for taking a stand against Jim Crow laws, and upon taking my oath of office in 1988, I took comfort in how far race relations had advanced since that dark time.

  I found a camaraderie with other legislators rallying around a new reform governor, Democrat Charles “Buddy” Roemer. We entered the legislature with one of the best groups elected in Louisiana—people like Randy Roach of Lake Charles; Sean Reilly, Melvin “Kip” Holden, and Raymond Jetson of Baton Rouge; Charles Riddle of Marksville; all representatives dedicated to politics that make a difference in people’s lives. President Ronald Reagan’s popularity had caused a number of Democratic officials to switch parties and become Republicans, but Louisiana still had a strong statewide Democratic majority. The guys in my group felt we were part of a New South dawning. Next door in Mississippi, Governor Ray Mabus, a Harvard Law School alumnus and a Democrat, was trying to steer a reform agenda of his own. And Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas, a graduate of Georgetown and Yale Law School, shared the vision of a South moving past its old, bitter divisions of race and class.

  The state was nearly bankrupt when Roemer took office; stabilizing the tax structure was a pivotal early issue. Our team focused on a socially progressive but fiscally responsible agenda. And unlike the bitter partisan divide today, we put together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to pass a statewide sales tax to balance the budget. Louisiana had a system of public hospitals linked to Charity Hospitals in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which we also reorganized under the LSU School of Medicine system to streamline efficiency in services and finances.

  Louisiana has abundant natural resources, beautiful land, and a thriving culture of wonderful people, bighearted and big souled. Nevertheless, the state was near the top of all the “bad” lists—the national rankings of shortest life expectancy, low-birth-weight babies, infant mortality, poverty, obesity, illiteracy, and incarceration—and near the bottom on the “good” lists—college graduates and new jobs created. Politically, we had been so hobbled by corruption as to undercut the purpose of government—to deliver services to help people improve their lives, educate their children, make a good living, and find prosperity in their jobs and businesses.

  On the eighty-mile drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, as Lake Pontchartrain receded and Interstate 10 passed lush, semitropical foliage, I kept thinking about the divide between so much poverty, in pockets many people never saw, and the beauty of the bayous, the oak-lined parks, the lakes and Gulf channels where people fished, and the festivals where people danced and served grand food, embracing laissez les bon temps rouler—let the good times roll. Before they rose to the middle class, people of Cajun and Creole communities found a way to love life and celebrate death, to dance in the face of the devil and let the joy of living permeate their lives.

  And yet as a political matter, race and poverty can hardly be separated. As we often see today, the common strategy during the decades of segregation was to scare poor whites into thinking that blacks and other minorities were their enemies, when in fact they all faced the same economic hurdle. When you enact a policy, pass a law, impose a tax, or grant a tax break, the repercussions that reach down the socioeconomic scale may be subtle at first, but the impact can be real. The state recovery sales tax we eventually passed under Roemer staved off massive cuts to education and health care, which would have disproportionately affected lower-income families, since these are services poor people—black and white—depend on.

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  On that day at Auschwitz in the summer of 1980, I committed to fight against bigotry and hatred if I ever confronted it. I could never have known how quickly it would stare me directly in the face. In the summer and fall of 1988, as Vice President George H. W. Bush ran for president against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, an obscure candidate named David Duke competed first for the Democratic slot, and then for the Populist Party, a white nationalist fringe group. Born in Oklahoma, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard in the 1970s, Duke wore a coat and tie like any other candidate, pitching an appeal to disaffected whites on issues such as affirmative action, welfare reform, and set-aside guarantees for minority contractors on public building projects at a certain level. Duke’s “issues” were a coded way of masking his longtime racial bigotry. Like most people, I gave no thought to Duke as a presidential candidate. Elections large and small attract all kinds of people willing to pay the filing fees and run for office, with not a chance to win, yet hoping for media attention to their personalities or causes. When his name occasionally popped up, I dismissed him as a hate-mongering quack. During the Louisiana Democratic presidential primary, he aired a thirty-minute paid political ad in which he spoke like a serious candidate with carefully worded messages on his core themes, particularly welfare. He got 23,390 votes, or 3.8 percent of the total votes cast, in that state primary. On the national Election Day, he won 48,267 votes, or .05 percent, on the Populist ticket. Where does a presidential candidate go after such a poor showing?

  The answer came a few months later, in early 1989, when a State House seat became vacant in Metairie, the nearest suburb to New Orleans in neighboring Jefferson Parish. David Duke jumped into the race even though, as we later learned, he didn’t even live in the district.

  Metairie was like many white-flight suburban areas outside cities. Cheryl grew up on one of its quiet streets and loved it. Metairie also had wealthy enclaves with expensive homes, and a strip of wonderful small restaurants in Bucktown, an area along Lake Pontchartrain that had once been a fishing village. Demographically, the district was also full of people who left the city to avoid integrated public schools, have safer streets, and try to retain a semblance of the close neighborhoods they knew growing up. Some were afraid, and moved for reasons of race; others, for economic reasons and greater opportunity. It was all part of a massive national shift in population to the expanding suburbs, where the Nixon and Reagan adm
inistrations allocated greater federal resources, thus reshaping politics over the next fifty years. The trend is reversing today, as more people are moving into cities. The political transformations will be equally profound. The great policy test at hand is to strike a balance in federal support of cities and rural towns, and to stabilize the federal budget in order to do so.

  There was little media interest in an off-year suburban legislative race, but Duke was impressing people at candidates’ forums, and as the primary unfolded, stories about his bizarre back pages made some reporters begin to take interest.

  In 1970, as an LSU undergraduate in Baton Rouge, Duke had paraded in a Nazi uniform at the university’s “Free Speech Alley,” where speakers on any topic have a forum. He was protesting an appearance by William Kunstler, the radical lawyer who was defending demonstrators who had been arrested at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Sporting a swastika on his sleeve, Duke carried a sign that read GAS THE CHICAGO 7. In most states a photograph like that dredged up from a candidate’s past would be a political obituary. But Louisiana has its own ideas about what works in politics (see under: Huey Long and Edwin Edwards). He was tapping a vein of anger and fear, injecting race into the campaign, which the other candidates didn’t want to exploit, and in a sinister way his notoriety benefited him. When called to account for the 1970 protest—some people actually called him “The Nazi of LSU”—he brushed off as “youthful mistakes” the jaded theatrics of an anti-Semite. He kept steering his message back to welfare abuse, affirmative action, and minority set-asides, attacking people of color but in smoother language than in his Ku Klux Klan days. The hate hadn’t changed; the message was just more softly packaged, trading on stock GOP issues and its core Southern Strategy. His job was to persuade people that he wasn’t who he was.

  In 1980, Ronald Reagan had declared in a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where the Ku Klux Klan had murdered three civil rights workers in 1964—“The South will rise again!” As president, he promoted tax breaks for segregated Southern academies and tried to substitute pickle relish for vegetables in school lunches. Those measures failed, but the attempt itself sent a signal to a white Southern base. Richard Nixon had pioneered the Southern Strategy, milking the region’s oldest fear, courting whites who resented the federal courts for altering their way of life. The idea that the South bore any responsibility for the long, cruel domination of blacks was papered over, casting African Americans as both aggressors and victims of their own vices. In a very real sense, the Republican Party’s hard right tilt played into Duke’s hands.

  Duke worked hard to present himself as an unflappable candidate, speaking in reasoned cadences, telling people who asked about his years in the KKK that he had “evolved” in his views, using TV news to project an image of cool and calm. The tacit rule of news coverage for local elections of this kind was to be balanced in allotting time and focus on the major candidates, without going overboard in deep reporting on anyone. Few heard, then, about Duke’s background.

  A weird script was emerging, one I had not seen before—a politician’s ability to promote himself as new and different, broken loose from a vicious past, as if the past had almost never happened. He tempered questions about his Klan activity by denying facts or shading reality. When I look back today, David Duke’s demagoguery stands like a dress rehearsal for the rise of Donald Trump. While he may not have worn a hood or swastika, Trump’s rhetoric and actions during his 2016 presidential campaign were shockingly similar to the tactics deployed by Duke in 1989. Because of their outlier status, both candidates got loads of free media coverage that allowed them to define themselves. With Steve Bannon’s help, Trump cultivated a base of white nationalists, many of whom are Nazis, in or out of the closet, as we saw in the June 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, riot.

  As journalists began digging up Duke’s past, we learned of a numbing record of associations with Nazis, home-grown fascists, anti-Semites, hate groups, and Klan members. But the information emerged in fits and starts, and during those winter weeks in Metairie in 1989, the overshadowing factor was Duke’s telegenic skill, the power of the demagogue to push a message—blame the other; the problem is blacks. Duke also had an extraordinary hatred for Jews, which he did his best to mask.

  Like the economic angst felt by people today that propelled Donald Trump, Louisiana had a 10 percent unemployment rate, the nation’s highest at the time, when Duke emerged as a political lightning rod. But for all of the raw feelings among white people on the economic edge amid the state recession, the Metairie district was largely affluent, a mix of traditional Republicans and Reagan Democrats, people who kept their old party affiliation while supporting a popular GOP president. What did they see in Duke?

  “We need him now,” a New Orleans Country Club member, who naturally requested anonymity, told Times-Picayune columnist Iris Kelso. “We have to send a message to the blacks.” A message—the same stale, old logic of the Lost Cause supporters who put up the Jefferson Davis statue in 1911 as a symbol of white control, white power. What did that message mean now? That crime, teenage pregnancies, and violence bred of poverty would not be tolerated? That welfare victimized white people—when many (if not many more) whites relied on the same assistance?

  The parallels between David Duke and President Trump, as demagogues, are breathtaking. Duke shadowboxed with his past to suggest he wasn’t a hardened bigot; many white voters in the district liked him for “standing up” to blacks—an issue that had little bearing on the needs of that suburban district. Trump has found a way to depict Mexicans and immigrants as rapists and criminals; urban cities as dark, crime-ridden places; black athletes as unpatriotic; refugees as welfare and government-assistance mongers. Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan is the dog whistle of all times. The meaning is deeply hidden in the words to the unassuming eye and ear but comes on like a freight train to those who are attuned to its meaning. It seems so benign, but the word again gave the line its punch. Again fills African Americans with dread. Exactly when were we great before? What are we going back to? And by the way, your great wasn’t so great for me.

  To people in the falling middle class, whether in Appalachia, the Deep South, the Rust Belt, or other areas where factory jobs had dried up, Make America Great Again sent a message: restore the America whose booming postwar economy saw factory workers buy houses and secure a middle-class life. But the massive shift from an industrial economy to the digital revolution, with factories closing and companies sending jobs overseas—can’t be reversed by the mere waving of a presidential wand. Retraining people for a new economy takes government investment, just as the GI Bill of Rights gave soldiers returning from World War II college tuition to get an education that positioned them for good employment. The social Darwinists running today’s Republican Party don’t believe in government programs like that. Trump’s macho theatrics had a galvanizing appeal, but when you get down to meat on the table, what has Trump—or this Republican-majority Congress—done to uplift those working-class Americans?

  The other ring in Trump’s “make us great” mantra—his attack on Muslims—played that same screechy fiddle, fanning fear—blame the other. “Make America Great Again” carries a coded mantra: make America white again. David Duke crowed to that fiddle more than any politician I ever encountered until I watched the rise of Trump. He plays on fear of the other, on us versus them, which frankly I thought was done after we sent David Duke packing.

  Duke made his living off a bizarre organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People (you’ll get the reference). He ran the NAAWP with mass-mail marketing and subscriptions to a periodic newspaper that included a long list of mail-order books, some of which debunked the Holocaust as a myth. It didn’t take much time perusing NAAWP material for me to realize that Duke, even if he had cut his ties to the Klan, was a white supremacist, a fascist, and probably a Nazi, though proof of that was borderline
at the time. Much later, a Times-Picayune reporter described him as “a self employed career fundraiser.” The struggle it took, by many people over several years in Louisiana, to push Duke back into his cave of lies and warped beliefs, is a story worth recalling today.

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  Many people in New Orleans resentfully remember my father’s tenure as mayor in the seventies as the time when African Americans got jobs in the city government and a greater profile in politics. That is certainly true; but it was also a time of comparative affluence across racial lines—the whole city was booming. Downtown, Poydras Street saw construction of hotels and office buildings. Various capital projects elsewhere in town included restoration of the French Market, while new houses went up in the suburbs of New Orleans East, all amid a general increase in African American employment. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative in the 1960s still carried over in revenue-sharing funds under the Nixon administration. Reagan famously said that he ended the war on poverty because “poverty won.” A great sound bite, but how true? Consider the analysis of the historian Kent Germany, in his deeply researched study New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society:

  The question of who won the War on Poverty has dominated the examination of the Great Society’s legacies. The one undeniable fact is that the official poverty rate did decline in the United States. It fell from 19 percent in 1964 to a low of 11.4 percent in 1978, rising to 13.1 by 1989. The rate was at 11.3 in the year 2000. In Louisiana, the rate fell from 26.3 percent in 1969 to 18.6 percent in 1979 before rising to 23.6 percent in 1989. By 2000, it was 19.6 percent. In New Orleans, the city’s overall poverty rate was actually higher in 2000 (at 28 percent) than in 1960 (at 25 percent), attributable partly to demographic shifts. The local black poverty rate, however, fell dramatically from 50 percent in 1960 to near 30 percent in 2000. . . .