Blood and Politics (26 page)

The Shearer faction brought several significant assets into this fight. With its roots in the American Independent Party, it had demonstrated a stronger record of running candidates for office. For a time, Shearer’s faction also controlled most (but not all) party activists in California and the upper Midwest as well as the putative national officers. Shearer did not control a publication as widely circulated as
The Spotlight
, however, and could not sustain a national organization without Carto’s support.

One leader then loyal to Carto demonstrated a remarkable self-consciousness about the party’s prospects: “The ’84 effort had no follow-up, as ineffective chairmen and then a nasty public feud between the original founders of the Party and the unpopular but shrewd Bill Shearer sapped much of the remaining energy that had been created,” he wrote in the party’s newsletter.
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After a break occurred, Carto followed a three-track strategy to rebuild a party without Shearer’s faction. First, Carto loyalists started seceding from Shearer’s outfit state by state. Where that wasn’t possible, as in California and Wisconsin, Carto established parallel state operations. Next, he convened a meeting of loyalists to sign documents formally acknowledging the party’s financial debt to Liberty Lobby.
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Carto’s third track led him, once again, to search for a mainstream public figure to front for less reputable but more ideologically dependable activists.

All three tracks converged at this March 1987 meeting outside Pittsburgh.
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While most of the 150 attendees came from Pennsylvania, a smattering of others “represented” twenty-six states, giving the event a national veneer.
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From the podium Carto pushed through his agenda. He moved adoption of the original Populist Party platform, which he had written with Bob Weems. It passed unanimously. Gathering steam, Carto read the new bylaws to the crowd. They cheered when the office of “parliamentarian” (Shearer’s old post) was abolished. Then they passed the bylaws unanimously by voice vote—despite complaints from the back of the room that what was being read (no printed copies were available) couldn’t be heard. Brooking no opposition, Carto then nominated Tom McIntyre for chairman. McIntyre’s credentials consisted of a 1986 run for Congress in which he won 5 to 9 percent of the vote “in
some precincts.”
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There were no other nominations, and the forty-seven-year-old electrician from the Pittsburgh area was elected unanimously. Still standing impatiently at the front, Carto then nominated the vice chair and the secretary. They also were elected unanimously. His control complete, Carto stepped aside and let the new secretary nominate a new treasurer.
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Carto’s loyal assistant,
Spotlight
reporter Michael Piper, gave a state-by-state assessment of the party. Pennsylvania had the strongest state organization. The South, Piper noted, wasn’t the stronghold that had been expected. Sturdy organizations existed only in North Carolina and Georgia. The state of Florida required 150,000 petition signatures to get ballot status, so the Populists didn’t even try to run as a third party there. When Piper asked the crowd how many had ever worked on an electoral campaign, only one-third of the conventioneers raised their hands. Even fewer, about thirty, had ever directed a campaign, and only twenty had ever been candidates.
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For want of any other obvious avenue toward renewal, the party’s hopes rested heavily with its banquet speaker, the former congressman George Hansen, a hard-core conservative Republican from southern Idaho. Hansen had won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1964, the year Senator Goldwater lost the presidential election. Hansen prevailed in six subsequent congressional elections but lost two bids for the Senate.
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While in Congress he became known for opposing taxes and the Internal Revenue Service. In 1984 he was convicted of violating recently passed congressional ethics laws. He was initially sentenced to five to fifteen months in jail.
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Hansen was so popular, however, that while his case was on appeal, he won the Republican nomination for Congress and lost the general election by only 170 votes out of 200,000 cast. He went to jail for six months in 1986 but was later exonerated.
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George Hansen had a long-standing connection with Willis Carto and the Liberty Lobby. As noted earlier, he had spoken in 1981 at the event celebrating
The Spotlight
, which published numerous articles supporting him while he was in prison. His wife, Connie, had returned the favor, signing a fund-raising letter for Liberty Lobby.
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After he was paroled,
The Spotlight
published a laudatory interview with him as a three-part series.
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At the same time, Liberty Lobby’s tabloid and the Populist Party’s newsletter began promoting him as a potential candidate for president in 1988. It reasoned that Hansen would fill its most pressing need, a magnetic leader with broad appeal.
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Hansen’s speech at the Populist meeting in Pennsylvania that March was remarkable mainly for his open display of friendship with Willis Carto. He turned to Carto several times, referring to him with a familiar
“Willis” and seemed to be pleased with the crowd. He blasted the predictable targets: the IRS, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies. At the end a planned demonstration took the floor, complete with hansen for president placards.
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While finding, courting, and using mainstream figures typified Carto’s approach to party building, Hansen had no intention of becoming the Populist Party’s candidate for president in 1988. But he didn’t want to seem like an ingrate either. So he told the cheering convention that he would allow himself to be its stand-in candidate until someone else more suitable was found. Hansen eventually turned down the Populist Party’s entreaties altogether and developed his own Christian patriot road show, focusing on tax protest and the IRS instead.

With the Populist Party still fixated on making Hansen its candidate, David Duke went to an Atlanta suburb (rather than his hometown in Louisiana) and announced a campaign for the Democratic Party primaries still seven months away. For the occasion, on June 8, he secured a meeting hall at the Marriott Hotel. Before the event actually started, attorney Sam Dickson strolled by in earnest conversation with Don Black, both dressed handsomely in dark suits.
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Outside the room’s double-doors two thickset biker Klan goons stood guard under the direction of Frank Shirley, a less physically imposing member of Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People. Shirley buzzed with energy. He had helped instigate the white riot in Forsyth and strutted like a north Georgia rooster that night—full of authority and command. Not quite mainstream material. Shirley and the bodyguards were joined by assorted grand dragons and their less augustly titled brethren from Florida, Alabama, the Carolinas, and Georgia. A crowd of a hundred took their seats.
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After the doors closed, Jim Yarborough arrived. Tall, balding, and bland, Yarborough was from the same generation as Willis Carto and lived in Gainesville, Georgia, just a fifteen-minute jump down the roadway from Forsyth County. Yarborough was then national vice chairman of the Populist Party, the latest in a series of posts he held whenever Carto controlled the party’s apparatus. That night he was Carto’s eyes and ears in Georgia, assessing Duke’s future prospects. Forsyth County was still on everyone’s mind, and Duke had not yet plea-bargained his charges from the second march. The new energy (and money) created by these battles, it was presumed, could launch Duke’s presidential campaign. Yarborough said he would give Carto a good report, although Duke announced a run in the Democratic primaries and not (yet) as a
Populist.
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Inside the room Duke gave an updated and sanitized version of his old standard Klan stemwinder. The crowd loved it.

But if Duke’s campaign was to be any different from his bids as a Klansman for the Louisiana state senate in 1975 and 1979, he needed more than the attention of a few grand dragons in an Atlanta hotel. His first task was to be noticed outside the movement’s immediate circles. Carto and Liberty Lobby obviously thought Duke’s notoriety would get him the necessary publicity. Then money and votes would follow. “The establishment media won’t be able to resist talking about Duke’s former Klan connections,”
The Spotlight
gloated. “It will guarantee automatic publicity for his campaign.”
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That estimate might have been right, but it wasn’t.

Duke had long practiced the art of racist ambulance chasing. Like a shyster attorney soliciting for clients at fires and traffic accidents, he sought out every racial conflict from busing in Boston to immigration on California’s southern border. He would show up with just a few troops but often capture local media interest nonetheless. And he would walk away with new recruits and their money. His recent foray into Forsyth County, for example, had projected him to the front of a large racist demonstration and flushed his pockets with dollars for a defense fund. Not bad for a couple of days’ work.

He decided to follow the same path with the Democratic Party. That meant chasing after the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was running a genuine campaign through the primaries. Duke figured he could seek out an altercation, and a war of words would make him a contender among anti-Jackson Democrats. Two decades before, Jackson had emerged as a Southern Christian Leadership Conference lieutenant, followed by years as a Chicago-based civil rights figure. Jackson had transformed presidential politics in 1984, however, with a credible run in the Democratic Party’s primaries. Although that first campaign had been marred by Jackson’s alliance with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam as well as his infamous reference to New York City as “Hymietown,” Jackson had mobilized some of the party’s most liberal constituencies. By the time Duke announced, Jackson was the most visible black leader in the country.

Duke thought he smelled money and votes in a confrontation with Jackson. Running in the Democratic Party as Wallace did in 1972 offers tremendous advantages for “us,” Duke explained. The candidacy of Jesse Jackson gives “us” an opportunity unparalleled in recent American politics, he told followers.
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He conjured up the specter of Jesse Jackson at every available opportunity, whether it was a speech to a small group in Georgia or to tens of
thousands of direct-mail recipients. When Jackson announced his own candidacy in North Carolina, for example, Duke rushed to the spot. He and a small band of protesters raised picket signs in hopes of finding a cooperating television camera. “I have news for Jesse Jackson,” Duke proclaimed, “the people who founded this country are no longer going to stand idly by while we lose our rights and heritage.”
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Only Duke’s followers heard the pitch. The general media, for once, did not tune into his megaphone.

Duke also tried to gain entry to the Democratic Party’s public debates. But the national committee chair, Paul Kirk, instructed state party chairmen to freeze him out of public forums.
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And when Democrats debated publicly in Houston, Duke was forced to sue to try to gain a place at the table. The suit failed, and so did the anti-Jackson gambit. Boxed out of regular Democratic Party functions, Duke took a step back and leaned heavily on his existing networks, in the process preparing himself for the explosion of support that would come later.

If David Duke’s plans to turn the Democratic Party into a racist launch pad fizzled, Willis Carto’s Populist Party could not even find a fuse. A Labor Day weekend event in St. Louis was supposed to be a national convention. Only one hundred Populist diehards dragged into a hotel near the airport, however, fewer than had gone to the meeting in Pittsburgh six months before.
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Far less attended than the Nashville convention in 1984, when six hundred enthusiastic souls had cheered the ill-fated candidacy of Bob Richards. Three years of party building had produced a net loss of five hundred conventioneers—not an auspicious start for the 1988 elections. If this rate of decline continued, the party would disappear completely in less than a decade.

In contrast with the anemic showing in St. Louis, 275 Klan types marched vigorously through Stone Mountain, Georgia, that same September weekend. They staged a nighttime cross burning, attended by another hundred souls. Two of the speakers that night were Frank Shirley and Ed Fields, both of whom had listened favorably to Duke’s announcement speech the previous June. The two missed the Populist meet in St. Louis, however. Cross burnings apparently excited them in ways that stuffing envelopes and walking precincts never could.
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At the so-called convention, the new chairman, Tom McIntyre, tried to pep up the crowd, but he succeeded only in reminding everyone how much it depended on
The Spotlight
and Liberty Lobby. “There would be no patriotic movement in America today without him,” McIntyre said while introducing Carto to the platform. Carto, in turn, gave a long-winded introduction to Bob Weems, the former Klansman with the windmill delivery. Weems understood populism better than anyone else,
Carto averred. At the very instant Carto finished a relatively august introduction, Weems jumped up, mumbled something about going to the “little boys’ room” and ran off to the restroom. Instead of Tom Watson and William Jennings Bryan, Carto and Weems seemed more like Laurel and Hardy.
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Weems returned to the convention only slightly embarrassed and rehashed the basic themes of his 1984 speech in Arkansas: populism was the unique philosophy of white American nationalism, different from all variants of conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism and opposed to internationalism and Zionism. Another Mount Nebo figure, the former American Nazi Party captain Ralph Forbes, also spoke. Forbes’s campaigns for a county board in 1985 and the Republican Party primary for Arkansas lieutenant governor in 1986 practically made him a veteran candidate. Keith Shive was also back. The Farmers Liberation Army chief cum Kansas state party chairman also had a turn at the platform, reminding everyone about the “Jew families” that owned the Federal Reserve. Any of the attendees caught napping in their seats could have recited the litany in their sleep.
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