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.
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 administrations 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.
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. . . .
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 majority 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. When 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.
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 contracts 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.
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.