Blood and Politics (46 page)

After Atlanta, Dickson handed Tyndall off to Ed Fields, who had changed the name of his tabloid to
The Truth at Last
. Fields chaperoned the Brit across the country. The two men shared a penchant for bullhorn-in-the-street parades, and like Tyndall, Fields flitted back and forth between uniformed sectarianism and coat-and-tie opportunism. (When Tyndall last visited the States, he had stayed with Fields and his wife, Jayne.) The two were old friends and a perfect fit. As they snaked their way across the country, Tyndall and Fields encountered a dizzying number of individuals and organizations, each alternately collaborating and combating the other for pride of place.

At the stop in North Carolina, A. J. Barker served as host and used the meeting to promote his own goals within the Populist Party. Since the Chicago meeting two years earlier, when the fight between Willis Carto and Don Wassall first started, Barker and other party activists in the South had stepped away from both factions. At this meeting he drew together a group of party units from across the Southeast. Don Black, now living in West Palm Beach and married to David Duke’s ex-wife Chloe, represented the Florida Populist Party at this event. He argued that the prospects for a pure third party option seemed dim when compared with the success Duke was then enjoying as a Republican. Attorney Kirk Lyons, freshly returned from his speech in Munich, also attended and spoke from the lectern. Here Tyndall was virtually an afterthought.

A similar situation surrounded Tyndall several days later at his speech in Maryland, where the event was ostensibly sponsored by the Maryland Populist Party. This state party was completely controlled by Carto’s Liberty Lobby. While visiting its offices in D.C., Tyndall taped an interview for future broadcast over Liberty Lobby’s radio network. And when he spoke at the nighttime event in the suburb of Lanham, Maryland, Carto used the event as window dressing in his fight with Don Wassall. Bob Weems was rolled out to speak once again, establishing Liberty Lobby’s credentials as the founding agency of the Populist Party. Carto made a rare public appearance to announce the creation of a Populist Action Committee. He said the new “committee” would support “populist” candidates, whichever party they ran from—Democrat, Republican, or Populist. It would raise funds to do this work, but the money would stay inside the Liberty Lobby complex rather than be contributed to specific candidates. The formation of this “committee” was a shrewd recognition that David Duke’s Louisiana victory had shifted much of the far right’s
electoral action back inside the Republican Party. It also established a virtual competitor to Wassall for precious movement funds. About one hundred people heard the pitch.

If Tyndall understood that one of his tour’s sponsors, Liberty Lobby, was using his visit to help eviscerate another of the tour’s supporters, Wassall’s Populist Party, he did not publicly acknowledge it. After Maryland, Tyndall and Fields were hosted in the area around Clifton, New Jersey, by Populist Party activists tightly aligned with Wassall. At that meeting the most imposing figure on the platform was not John Tyndall or Ed Fields but Chester Grabowski. A silver-haired publisher of a community weekly tabloid,
The Polish Post Eagle
, Grabowski had been a Populist Party candidate the previous November. His fervent émigré-style Polish nationalism seemed out of place next to the Hitlerite Tyndall. But Grabowski proudly printed accounts of the meeting, which drew a few Klansmen down from Canada, in addition to about 150 anti-Semites from the New York–New Jersey area.
¹⁹
For his part, Tyndall glowed. “We should salute our Slavonic fellow-Whites for standing up,” he wrote in his account of the trip.
²⁰

Next Tyndall flew to Los Angeles, where he spoke at another forum for Wassall loyalists. While in Southern California, he also met at the Institute for Historical Review offices with staff there. The final speaking event was in Chicago, organized by a longtime Klan state leader, and drew about a hundred people, many from the harder national socialist edges of the movement.

At each stop, Tyndall sold crates of his
Eleventh Hour
tome. He gave roughly the same stump speech, regardless of the factional intrigue around him. Over and over again he told his audiences that the twentieth century, and World War Two in particular, had virtually sunk the white race’s prospects. “The retreat of the white man is universal,” he claimed, obviously ignoring (white) Europe’s most recent military adventure among darker-hued Arab peoples. “We have seen in one place after another the blacks taking control.” There was a small grain of truth in Tyndall’s assessment. Black people in the American South, for example, could now vote and elect people to office. Britain had lost most of its empire. Black people in South Africa were about to elect their first majority rule government. Nevertheless, Tyndall’s reasoning was a bit over the top. Listening to him, you might have thought it had been African nations that had convened the 1888 Berlin Conference to carve up Europe and that Eastern European Jews had started World War Two. “The greatest lunacy of all,” he added, had been “the lunacy of World War II in which the best of American, British, and German manhood
died on the battlefields of Europe.” Once again the background music was familiar.

If each speech rehashed bleary old complaints, Tyndall usually concluded his remarks with a clear perception of the prospects for change. The post–World War Two era was dying, and a new period was being born. The twenty-first century, he believed, would mark a new beginning. “We are coming to an era in the century to come when the great white race, with all its genius and glory, is going to get off its knees and stand up straight,” he said. “We are living in a time of great historical change,” he repeated. “The system has collapsed in the East,” Tyndall thundered. “Let us work to make it collapse in the West.”
²¹

John Tyndall’s visit to the United States revealed many of the cross-organizational bonds that created a movement out of what looked like a series of uncoordinated single enterprises. It was also an early manifestation of the increased level of transatlantic interchange by white supremacists in the years that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In addition to visits by American Holocaust deniers to Germany, white power skinheads were to find their counterparts across Western Europe and Scandinavia. Eventually, the traffic was to flow farther east into Russia and Ukraine, where anti-Semites of all countries could unite in a common cause.

Within the United States, sectors of the white electorate, defined less by its economic fortunes and more by its ideological concerns—i.e., race—began to see themselves as a group, much like a traditional “ethnic group.” Some believed that their group had already lost its dominant place in American life, a view that is usually imbued with some variant of anti-Semitism. (Jews run the government, media, etc., and act in other ways like a ruling class.) Others believed that their group would soon lose their dominant place in American life, usually through what they described as racial “swamping”—i.e., multiculturalism, immigration, special rights for black people, etc. Over time these sectors of the white populace became increasingly self-conscious of themselves as a distinct group. Many adopted ideological characteristics similar to those of oppressed racial minority groups. And like Croatians and Serbians who could not countenance each other while under the same Yugo roof, the most “advanced” elements saw themselves as white nationalists, no longer willing to live in a multinational state—even if they were still objectively the dominant racial and ethnic group. They needed only a strong leader to break open the political terrain. And that happened first in Louisiana with David Duke.

With a newly energized race-conscious constituency, white nationalists enter the fray of presidential politics and seek a marriage of convenience with Christian nationalists opposed to abortion, homosexuals, and Bill Clinton. Debacles at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, tip the tactical advantage to the white-ists.

November 16, 1991.
Louisiana is not the former Yugoslavia. When medieval Serbs were still fighting Ottoman Turks at the gates of Europe, Choctaw and Caddo civilizations lived peacefully on opposite sides of Lake Pontchartrain. But the state does suffer its own history of split personality disorders. Prior to purchase in 1803 and statehood in 1812, the territory flew both Spanish and French flags. A civil law system rooted in French conventions thus remains underneath the Anglo-American juridical system. The Spanish division into parishes, rather than counties, remains also as a reminder of an era when no wall separated church from state. And the flags of the Confederacy may have ceased flying from government buildings, but the residue of white supremacy still hangs in the air like moss in a cypress swamp.

For a brief moment after the Civil War, democracy swept across the plantations, and black people joined white people at the polls and in government. Under the protection of Union troops, three black lieutenant governors sat in Baton Rouge during the Reconstruction era. But white marauders overturned this first attempt at black enfranchisement and restored white supremacy. In 1874 the Klan-like White League defeated police and black militiamen in an armed battle on the streets of New Orleans.
¹
Reconstruction nationally ended with the presidential election of 1876, when Louisiana’s electoral delegates were traded to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as part of a compromise that effectively withdrew the protection of federal troops from freedmen in the South.
²
Twenty years later the U.S. Supreme Court formally institutionalized its “separate but equal” doctrine in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, a case originating in Louisiana when Homer Plessy, a thirty-year-old light-skinned
shoemaker, attempted to buy a first-class (white) train ticket. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, had supposedly rendered unconstitutional laws that enforced badges of inferiority. But the
Plessy
case proved that constitutional guarantees established in one era could be disestablished in the next.
³

A system of legal apartheid formed atop one of North America’s most heterogeneous populations. Creoles mixed their French and Spanish heritage with the bloodlines of Africa. Cajuns spoke a French patois generations after their ancestors had fled Canada. Africans brought voodoo from the West Indies and gave New Orleans its own distinct music. And of course, it was the ill-paid labor of African-descended cane cutters and cotton pickers upon which the fantastically wealthy non-African plantation elite lived. This racial schizophrenia was passed down like a hereditary disease, until it reached Louisiana’s 4 million plus inhabitants in contemporary times. Black people numbered 1.3 million, or 31 percent of the populace. And those counting themselves white were split between Protestants (Baptists) in the north and Catholics in the South.
⁴

After Democrats in D.C. passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the white majority started voting Republican in presidential elections, yet remained Democratic in its local registration. In 1968 Louisiana’s whites voted overwhelmingly for Governor George Wallace’s segregationist campaign. The trend was interrupted in 1976, when the (new) black vote pushed the state into Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter’s column. Fourteen years later the black vote once again proved decisive, this time in the 1991 race for governor. David Duke carried a sharp majority of votes by whites, 55 percent, yet lost the election to former Governor Edwin Edwards, 701,024 to 1,086,820. Without the black vote, a dedicated national socialist would have lived in the governor’s mansion.
⁵

David Duke mounted the platform at the Hilton Inn ballroom in Baton Rouge and claimed that his defeat in the governor’s race was actually victory. “The candidate may have lost,” he told the assembly of volunteers and reporters, “but the message goes out across Louisiana and across this whole country.” Dispirited by the loss, the crowd chanted, “Duke, Duke, Duke,” with less than obvious enthusiasm. “The time has come to help people become more responsible for their lives and to teach them responsibility and all the things that go with it,” he continued. “This is an issue which goes forth across the country. The time has come to realize that government is not going to solve the problems of the
individuals of this nation. Only we as free and independent individuals can solve these problems.”
⁶

His speech that night sounded as if it had been copied straight from President Ronald Reagan’s conservative issues playbook, not from
The Spotlight
’s back pages. But mainstream respectability carried a high price. Three years after making himself the eye of Louisiana’s political hurricane and establishing himself as a viable candidate, Duke was now the victim of his own success. This election was his second loss in as many years. Although he was to run again and again, he had reached the end of his career as a credible candidate.

When we look back at the start of his career as a professional full-time candidate, Duke’s emergence seems inexplicable. How could someone who had screamed “white power” in front of a burning cross be elected to office or win a majority of whites’ votes? One knee-jerk explanation looked in the rearview mirror at the 1950s, seeing in Duke a reflection of the Jim Crow politicians of that era.
⁷
A more apt response, however, would have been to look through the windshield at the twenty-first century to come. A thousand threads knotted the past to the future, and the most significant tie-in was Duke himself.

Over decades he had developed a set of skills only the most veteran politicians possessed. As a nineteen-year-old national socialist in Louisiana State University’s Free Speech Alley, he had learned how to debate his opponents under the most difficult of circumstances. As a young Klan leader he had given hundreds of impromptu stump speeches, jumped into fawning crowds to shake hands, and learned to motivate volunteers and generate contributions. Most significantly, he had learned how to harness the power of television. He could speak over the head of any talk show host or news personality and reach directly into the living rooms of his potential constituents. His talent for smelling opportunity where others saw only chaos was uncanny. Witness his ability to turn mob violence in Forsyth County, Georgia, into a launching pad for his own comeback. And before finally winning an election, he had campaigned regularly over a period of a dozen years. He had run first as a Klansman for state office in 1976 and 1979, before his short stint in the Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential primaries. As a Populist Party candidate he learned to build the components of a viable (non-Klan) campaign machine and constructed a nationwide list of contributors. And in the state legislative race, as a Republican, he had knocked on doors and talked to voters one-on-one in a shoe leather campaign his opponent did not replicate.