In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  The titles of those screeds alone were offensive; the idea of hatred so organized and the politics of lying so sustained was repulsive. Yet as we know from the monitoring of hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, they have surged in popularity since Donald Trump. The rise of the alt-right, with their chants of “You will not replace us” and the violence they have perpetrated, is downright scary.

  After the election, Duke had marched down Metairie Road in the Jefferson Parish St. Patrick’s Day parade with other officials, cheered by people on the sidewalks as a celebrity, if not a conquering hero. When the pundits and national press attacked him, Duke’s base saw an underdog, a guy standing up for forgotten people. Trump cultivated a similar image, just enough to create the narrow wedge of some eighty thousand voters in the Rust Belt states who gave him a winning margin in the electoral college, despite Hillary Clinton’s three-million-vote victory in the popular vote.

  Riding a wave of popular support, Duke began traveling the state, stumping against Governor Roemer’s tax referendum to reduce the $700 million deficit, which had risen with the departure of two hundred thousand people during the prolonged recession. Roemer had more than a revenue revitalization plan at stake; his popularity—as a governor who took office with only 33 percent of the vote—was also riding on the outcome. Duke savaged the tax plan wherever he went. He was not the only factor, but he was a high-profile presence in its defeat, 55 percent to 45 percent.

  Demagogues thrive on their own theatrics, as Duke showed in one of his most vulnerable moments. Rickey went to Baton Rouge, and in the rotunda between the House and Senate chambers, she and a colleague from Tulane handed out press releases to reporters detailing the Nazi books she had purchased from Representative Duke’s office in Metairie. The state Endowment for the Humanities, in conjunction with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had mounted an exhibition of Holocaust photographs in the rotunda. Robyn Ekings, a New Orleans WVUE-TV reporter, borrowed Beth’s copy of Did Six Million Really Die? and waved it in front of Duke with the camera homing in. “Are you selling this book in your legislative office?” Rickey’s essay, from The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race, picks up the story:

  Duke’s face reddened, and he asked her excitedly who had brought her that book. Eckings pointed at me. Duke, with obvious agitation, turned and asked why I was doing this.

  “You’re treating me like Salman Rushdie!” he said to me, then turned on his heel and hurried away, pursued up the stairs by camera crews and reporters until he reached the sanctity of the floor of the legislature, where the press is not allowed. This bizarre reference to the author of The Satanic Verses, hiding from Muslim assassins, was vintage Duke, always the martyr. Reporters told me later that Duke called his office in Metairie from the House floor and warned his staff not to sell any more books.

  “The Nazi books” incident was considered a successful hit at Duke’s claims that he had changed. [Republican Party] Chairman William Nungesser called to congratulate me after he saw the media coverage. However, he said that the State Central Committee should not say anything about Duke. Nungesser still clung to the idea that Duke was not a racist but just an opportunist.

  The late William Nungesser maneuvered his troops to avoid censuring or ejecting Duke from the fold—he was bringing in new people, some of the Reagan Democrats, and other people from the far-right fringes who had not been active before. Beth Rickey felt betrayed, justifiably so, as Duke began gaining ground. Nungesser later told the New Republic that Duke was “an opportunist, rotten to the core.”

  Duke’s statewide campaign attacking Roemer’s tax referendum provided him with a network of contacts to build an organization to seek a larger base. Less than a year later, Duke took aim at the 1990 U.S. Senate race. The incumbent, J. Bennett Johnston, was a Shreveport lawyer who had originally served in the State Senate, lost the 1971 governor’s race to Edwards by a whisker, and with momentum from that effort won a special election in 1972 to fill the seat of U.S. Senator Allen Ellender, who had unexpectedly died. Johnston was a conservative Democrat with support from the oil-and-gas industry; he shifted with the times, forging ties with African American leaders. An adroit Senate tactician, Johnston knew how to pass bills and steer funds to the state for road construction and for major projects for ports, municipalities, and universities—he had a record of delivering to his constituents.

  I strongly supported Johnston, and felt that I could help him generate the substantial African American vote I thought he needed to win by a large margin. The question haunting me was how far Duke’s road show of demagoguery would take him—how deep his lies had penetrated, how much had public opinion shifted to his “issues”? The Times-Picayune assigned Tyler Bridges to cover Duke full-time. As the campaign came down to Johnston, Duke, and Ben Bagert, a Republican attorney and former state senator, Bridges reported that in the 1980s Duke celebrated Hitler’s birthday each April. A former girlfriend of Duke’s gave Bridges insight on his adulation of Hitler. As the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism unearthed more information about Duke’s links to neo-Nazi groups, the reporting opened a larger lens on Duke’s Nazi background, which made “former Klan Wizard” a soft way of identifying him—which journalists and talk-show producers still do when he finds a way to pop up.

  As Duke gained momentum, a polarizing force stoking people’s fears and resentments, I knew he had his share of Teflon—the record of a Klansman and closet Nazi didn’t bother his hardening base. How long would it take for the other white voters to realize that he was a fraud?

  Donald Trump is not a Nazi; yet he has courted white nationalists as Duke did, and like Duke, he speaks and tweets a fountain of lies, lying as naturally as normal people try to be truthful. All the bravado and psychological projection in that gimmicky term Fake news! as the media report his falsehoods is a booming echo to me of Duke comparing himself to Salman Rushdie as a martyr of free speech, or tearing up the paper with details on his Nazi background, crying “Character assassination!” As we finish this book in early 2018, with indictments in the Russia investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and escalating political drama, I watch our country’s institutional crisis provoked by Trump, and my thoughts turn again to the parallels with David Duke’s psychodrama. There is nothing the country is experiencing today that we in Louisiana haven’t seen or faced in the last thirty years.

  As the 1990 campaign began, Senator Johnston sent pollster Geoff Garin to do a focus group of twelve white swing voters from Bossier City, next door to the senator’s hometown of Shreveport. “Garin moderated the ninety-minute session and began with a few noncommittal questions to loosen them up,” Tyler Bridges writes in The Rise of David Duke.

  “What are you looking for in a senator?” he asked next.

  “Someone who still stand up to the NAACP,” said one man.

  “The NAACP is the most powerful interest group in America,” said another man.

  “All the benefits go to blacks at the expense of whites,” said a woman.

  For nearly the rest of the session, the group poured out hostility toward blacks, or “niggers” as two of them repeatedly said—and praised Duke as willing to stand up to blacks and the political establishment. When Garin asked if anyone was concerned about Duke’s Klan past, no one responded. A few minutes later, when he asked if Duke’s Nazi past was of concern, one woman said, “You know, Hitler had some good ideas.” As the group filed out, Garin was shaken. A veteran pollster, he had spent more than a decade directing focus groups, particularly when the topic was race. But he had never seen such anger directed at blacks or the political establishment.

  Duke had aired no political spots at that point; he had gotten more national TV coverage than any Louisiana politician, and tons of coverage in state. The people in that focus group got his message. Duke pushed a bill to gut affirmative action in Louisiana, which would have thrown a wrench into contra
cts between the state and federal government. The bill passed the House when normally centrist Cajun legislators, bristling over the refusal of three African American colleagues to support a lottery bill, threw their votes to the Duke measure. His bill died in the Senate. Without a forceful presence by Roemer, and with Duke getting so much attention that his every move generated headlines, reactionary impulses spilled out in the legislature, reminding me of the Yeats poem with the line: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The House moved a bill that I opposed—which passed despite being transparently unconstitutional—to subject record producers to misdemeanor fines if they did not put warning labels on morally objectionable lyrics in satanic heavy metal and rap music discs sold to minors. Pleas rained down from Henry Mancini, Andy Williams, and the Neville Brothers, the Grammy-winning kings of New Orleans rock, who were on tour in London and threatened to stop performing in Louisiana if the bill passed. New Orleans entrepreneurs were trying to secure an agreement to locate a Grammy Hall of Fame in the city. As the bill moved ahead, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences president Michael Greene, in Los Angeles, said that if the governor did not veto the bill, “We will pull all our initiatives out of Louisiana, as we did in Arizona when they refused to have the Martin Luther King holiday. We just won’t go there.” Roemer did eventually veto the bill.

  Duke was gaining visibility as he ran for the Senate. Bennett Johnston began attacking the NAAWP in speeches, making Duke’s past an issue; the Louisiana Committee Against Racism and Nazism aired spots on his Nazi past. The national Republican Party helped Johnston by failing to give candidate Ben Bagert—the official GOP nominee—adequate funds for a competitive campaign. Bagert dropped out near the end. Johnston was reelected in a landslide, 54 percent to 43.5 percent. But within that loss, David Duke had won nearly two out of every three white votes—a far cry from his slim 227-vote margin of victory in the Metairie district some twenty months earlier.

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  After two full years in the state legislature, Duke had failed to pass a single instrument as he faced increasing opposition from my colleagues in the House and Senate. I was proud of our coalition, of my colleagues who continued to stand up against Duke’s agenda of bigotry, and of our democratic institutions that had successfully boxed in Duke’s progress. Unbowed, Duke felt the wind at his back and decided to give up his legislative seat to run against Roemer for governor in the election of 1991. I was happy to be rid of his poisonous presence in the State House, but I knew the election would be a nightmare as he carried his message of hate across the state. Still, I saw no way for the electoral math to work in his favor.

  The late John Maginnis, an able chronicler of Louisiana politics, memorably called that election “the race from hell.” The governor seemed rudderless as the campaign geared up. Duke was challenging him from the hard right, and former governor Edwin Edwards was hungry for political redemption.

  As governor in the 1970s, Edwards had embraced New Orleans’s economic potential after the building of the Louisiana Superdome, with support for infrastructure projects and for growing the tourist economy. He got behind much of the agenda that my father, and his successor, Dutch Morial, put before the legislature in Baton Rouge, seeking support for capital improvements and programs to benefit the city. Edwards realized that New Orleans was becoming the economic engine of the state and was generally supportive.

  After serving two terms in the 1970s, Edwards had been ineligible for a third consecutive one. He made a roaring comeback in 1983 against Dave Treen, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, a dutiful man with moderate politics and a bland personality. In a debate, Edwards quipped, “Dave, your problem is that it takes you an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.” Oil production was humming in that election when Edwards bragged to Times-Picayune reporter Dean Baquet (today executive editor of the New York Times) that he was “safe with voters unless caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.” In promising, good times, his exotic personality demolished Treen in a landslide, and he served one term.

  Now he wanted a fourth term, something no Louisiana governor had achieved, and planned to hit Roemer from the left. Edwards traveled the state in a Winnebago with his girlfriend and staffers, hammering at Roemer every chance he got.

  Edwards typified Louisiana’s joie de vivre culture, a witty, roguish cad with a soft Cajun accent and a loose political style you find in few other states. During that third term, Edwards was twice tried for rigging hospital contracts, but was acquitted. The economy was in free fall as the price of oil had plunged; the state budget was tied to mineral severance taxes, which meant a cutback in state services. The oil industry, a major source of state jobs, was closing offices in New Orleans and elsewhere, with a rollback of drilling jobs in the state and on offshore sites in the Gulf of Mexico. People were literally leaving their homes, dropping the house keys in night deposit boxes at the banks, driving away from their mortgages and equity, and seeking employment and new lives in other states. This was particularly hard on New Orleans, where thousands of middle-class families, including middle-class whites and upwardly mobile African Americans, left to find quality work in cities like Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta. Having dropped out of the race for a fourth term just a few years earlier, Edwards was giving it one last try.

  In the 1991 gubernatorial election, David Duke made a hard pitch for Evangelical voters by proclaiming himself a pro-life Christian. The man who wanted welfare mothers to be inoculated with birth control serum, the man who had birthday parties for the worst mass murderer in European history, was suddenly a defender of life in the womb. And some Evangelical voters took the bait. When Duke knocked Roemer out of the primary, the Republicans had a nightmare. Edwin Edwards, the Democrat they hated most, was now poised to win against Duke, their candidate by default, who was soon being savaged by TV spots of Nazi troops as his “past” became an international story.

  Across the state, bumper stickers started to crop up: Vote for the Crook. It’s Important. Many people in Louisiana who could never imagine voting for Edwards, including Republicans, realized the disaster Louisiana faced should Duke win. In the final weeks, Duke, the born-again Christian, was attacking Edwards for his religious beliefs—being pro-choice. In a state where most people did not like abortion, Edwards crushed Duke with 61 percent of the vote. The message got through, you could say. Duke, however, received nearly six hundred thousand white votes, a huge number for a man whose Nazi sympathies were finally plastered all over the media.

  Within a space of several years, both Edwards and Duke would go to federal prison. Duke pleaded guilty to federal charges of filing a false tax return and mail fraud in December 2002. He served fifteen months in prison. In 2000, after it was proved that Edwards extorted nearly $3 million from companies that applied for casino licenses during his last term in office, he was convicted on seventeen counts of racketeering, mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. Edwards was sentenced to ten years in prison and served eight. He did not seek reelection and maintains his innocence to this day.

  As Duke sank in respectability and visibility, many of us felt a long hangover from his brief time in the sun. Before the 2016 presidential campaign, I can imagine that savants of the Beltway saw Duke as an aberration, the bizarre politics of a backwater state. In fact, our nightmare was a precursor of where our country is today. In those years, Louisiana politics demonstrated the raw susceptibility of voters, particularly Evangelical Christians, who rallied behind David Duke—trailed by TV spots exposing his Nazi beliefs—as a would-be defender of human life. It is the same phenomenon that allowed Christians in 2016 to support Donald Trump, despite the women who accused him of sexually assaulting them, after the Access Hollywood video in which he bragged about groping women, using words that TV networks bleeped out. Have we gotten to the point where winning is everything? It is clear there is a deal with the devil,
where morals, personal responsibility, or principles are secondary to election wins.

  We live in an age of disinformation, with so many overloaded circuits that journalism and news gathering is part of a strange digital stratosphere with few restraints and with easily doctored images that distort reality, and where the old role of spin doctors—those who seek to turn public opinion—is fast subsumed by con artists on social media, or even Russian manipulation. This is an atmosphere in which demagogues thrive.

  Back in 1990, I watched well-intentioned conservatives in our legislature buckle under to reactionary tides that surged because of Duke, even though he lacked the ability to pass any legislation. The chaos that followed as Roemer had to veto bills that had no constitutional validity made Louisiana a source of derision in the media and political life generally. David Duke was alt-right in the soft verbal currency of today; he ran on a racist, isolationist, nativist platform, and after three years, finally, sank like a stone in water. Those were hard, dark, grueling years for people who loved the state and wanted to make it better. Steve Bannon is doing the same thing to the Republican Party today. Congress is bipolar after a decade of Tea Party members pushing a radical agenda. Donald Trump’s flailing inability to lead and the temper tantrums of his bizarre, hair-trigger-tweeting personality open a window for the likes of Bannon to slither through. The nativist, isolationist agenda Bannon and Breitbart are pushing has the face of white supremacy leering at every turn at the party once led by Eisenhower, a war hero, and Abraham Lincoln.

  We saw it all coming in Louisiana years ago. When people are scared and hurting, when the jobs are drying up and they get angry, and a demagogue arises pointing the finger at black people and brown people—blame the other—it takes a counteroffensive not just to expose the lies but to offer people hope and a belief in the better impulses of democracy. When the truth is lost, the battle to fill that vacuum is a sinister spectacle and a struggle from which good people can never call retreat. From our days with Duke, I can tell you how to end it. You have to confront those tactics straight up, shine a bright light on them, and reveal the truth. And then you must confront the bigotry behind them head-on, stay on course, and pull the tree up from the root. There is no other way forward.