David Duke: Dixie Divider
The Ex-Klansman Taps Well of Discontent to Win a Louisiana House Seat, and a Constituency
March 21, 1989
By JOANNE HARRISON, Harrison is a Houston-based free-lance writer
METAIRIE,
La. — Inside the towering State Capitol building at Baton Rouge, the
Louisiana legislature had gotten down to the business of raising taxes.
In
the House chamber, more than 100 members, plus assorted staff and
lobbyists, milled around noisily as speech-making continued from the
podium. Huddling in the aisles between their crowded two-by-two desks,
legislators clad in Sears and Sans-a-belt slapped backs, slurped colas
and munched on peanuts.
Off in the far right corner of the
chamber, assigned to one of only two single desks, sat Republican David
Duke, newly arrived after a special election in the New Orleans suburb
of Metairie. Virtually hidden behind a wall of letters from
constituents and others as far away as Australia and South Africa, Duke
sat quietly, listening intently to the proceedings. From time to time
he got up to check a point with the Republican floor leader.
Finally,
he rose to speak. The chair acknowledged him with sardonic inflection.
Activity in the chamber ceased. Legislators turned their attention to
the rostrum. Dozens of reporters from all over the country flipped open
their notebooks. TV cameras, silent until now, came to life en masse.
Center of Attention
Duke
took the podium and in a light but not unpleasant voice demanded that
the proposed tax increase be labeled as such when it goes on the ballot
in April. He sat down. Normal activity resumed.
Meet David
Ernest Duke. He's thirtysomething, tall and gray-eyed handsome, a
university graduate and a church-going Methodist. He cares passionately
about the environment, drives a silver sports car, plays golf and
piano, skis, and loves homemade mashed potatoes.
So why is David
Duke the most notorious freshman legislator in America? Why is everyone
from George Bush to the Jewish Defense Organization up in arms about a
38-year-old yuppie?
Because this is no ordinary young
professional. Although Duke's charismatic personality helped elect him
in February to the District 81 seat in the Louisiana State House of
Representatives–and there is already talk of a run for Congress in
1990–he carries some of the most amazing political baggage in American
history.
Until 10 years ago, he was Grand Wizard and most
visible spokesman for the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1979 he left the Klan to found the National Assn. for the
Advancement of White People (NAAWP), an avowedly "racialist"
organization that he still heads.
The way Duke sees it, "race is
the most critical factor in the well-being of America" and maintaining
the white majority is essential. As he wrote recently in NAAWP News, "
. . . the racial makeup of America is vital to her well-being; our
genetic and cultural heritage must be preserved . . ." Duke founded the
NAAWP, he says, to advance these views.
Promoting such views is
nothing new for David Duke. In 1970, during his student days at
Louisiana State University, he came to national attention for picketing
a New Orleans appearance of radical lawyer William Kunstler while
wearing a Nazi uniform and carrying a sign that said: "Kunstler is a
Communist Jew."
(Duke, who now calls that incident "youthful
folly" and "a spoof" of Kunstler, says he is not now and has never been
a member of the Nazi party.)
On campus he regularly appeared at
Free Speech Alley, an area reserved for impromptu advocacy, and passed
out pro-white and pro-Nazi literature. "But," says James Reddoch, LSU
Vice Chancellor for Administrative Services, who was then Vice
President for Student Affairs, "even when his statements about the
Germans and Hitler and the Nazis didn't set too well on this campus, he
persisted. Hecklers are part of the Free Speech Alley tradition and he
handled them well. He was always well-spoken and polite."
Like
Julius Caesar's Gaul, Metairie–where David Duke grew up–is divided
into three parts: Old Metairie, an enclave of gracious old homes, huge
trees, doctors and lawyers; a middle, transitional zone that includes
some light industry; and Bucktown, a neighborhood of small middle-class
homes, working-class apartments and families going back generations.
District 81 encompasses chunks of all three. According to election
statistics, Metairie is 99.6% white.
It used to be a minor
suburb. But it "is now the largest incorporated municipality in the New
Orleans area," according to Mark T. Carleton, who teaches state history
at LSU and attributes Metairie's swell to "white flight." Before the
Civil Rights movement, many of the residents used to live in New
Orleans, he says, "but when their blocks were busted (black families
moved in), they moved across the line into Metairie."
Then in
the '80s a second wave of immigrants, this time affluent yuppies bent
on gentrification, pushed the area's working-class whites even further
into a psychic corner. One particularly heated issue is a proposed
marina that would displace local fishermen.
'Mad as Hell'
Says
Ronnie Blanchard, a retired Duke supporter from Bucktown, "We were mad
as hell and we didn't want to take it anymore. Some of our families
have been living here for 145 years, ever since this was a fishing
village, and now the politicians want to run 'em out to make marina
slips for the rich. David went to meetings of the fishermen's
organizations. We finally got somebody to speak up for us."
Duke
was elected by a slim majority of Metairie's voters, many of whom kept
their intentions quiet. Not Blanchard; he spent the weeks leading up to
the election putting up blue-and-white, 4×8 "Duke Country" signs around
the neighborhood. "Along come Tulane University 'volunteers' and spray
painted every one of 'em out," he recalls. "If they didn't get 'em,
then the garbage men took 'em every Monday and Thursday.
"But," chuckles Blanchard, "next day I'd just put up more."
Duke
signs appeared next to statues of the Virgin in Metairie's neat little
front yards and were propped against the bass boats on trailers in the
driveways. They decorated the cash registers at Martine's restaurant
and Fulco's bar.
Noteworthy Opposition
Not many materialized on the rolling
green lawns of Old Metairie. But, despite personal messages from
ex-President Reagan and President Bush and campaign help from the
President's son, Texan George W. Bush, Duke's opponent John Treen,
brother of a former Louisiana governor, mustered only 8,232 votes in
the runoff election; not enough to beat Duke's 8,456.
As
expected, Bucktown went solidly for Duke. In a poll conducted for the
New Orleans Times-Picayune just after the election, Duke voters said
they saw his candidacy "as a rare opportunity to help their own social
class." According to the poll, the big issues in District 81 included
opposition to increased taxes, fear of crime and a distaste for
"affirmative-action programs, minority set-asides, racial quotas and
other efforts on behalf of blacks" that many of the voters polled said
"have tilted the system against" the white majority.
"This issue
more than any other elected me," Duke says of the set-asides that were
originally designed to reserve one-quarter of all state contracts for
black-owned firms. "I believe in equal rights for whites," Duke says.
"Contract letting should be color blind. They should be given out on
the basis of merit."
Meritocracy and Honor
Meritocracy is a major theme with Duke. That and honor. He talks about them constantly.
"We
were good kids in grade school but with a high code of honor," Duke
says. To get a few minutes of quiet during a recent interview, he is
sitting in a cluttered storage room adjoining the offices of the NAAWP,
which are located in what seems once to have been the garage of a
two-story white frame house at 3603 Cypress St. in Metairie. According
to the Registrar of Voters records, until just before the District 81
election, this address was Duke's official domicile. But it's just over
the district line. In his filing papers, Duke listed his official
residence as an apartment a few blocks away.
The NAAWP office,
now also Duke's district headquarters, is paneled in knotty pine and
chock-a-block with battered metal desks. The phones ring constantly. A
steady parade of people adds to the noise level. On one wall is a
bookcase piled with the NAAWP hats and T-shirts which are offered for
sale through the NAAWP News.
Clearing a seat for his visitor,
Duke leans back in a battered office chair and reminisces. "We were
like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn," he says of his childhood. "We built
rafts and dug tunnels near the drainage canal; we played war and
cowboys and Indians. My friend . . . and I played chicken on our
bicycles in 4th grade. Neither one of us wanted to back off. We had so
much sense of honor. It was in our blood."
Duke pushes his
slipping sunglasses back up on top of his head. He wears a white polo
shirt, gray slacks, and a vintage brown leather bomber jacket. He
speaks quietly, rarely gesturing.
Environmental Concerns
"I love to fish and hunt," he says.
"That's one of the reasons I'm so concerned about the wetlands. I can
see what industrialization and pollution are doing to them. I write a
lot about ecology and the environment–but because of my situation, I
have to do it under a pseudonym."
Duke's situation is at least
in part a result of his previous writings. These have included
everything from "The Racialist," a 1971 publication in which he wrote
that "terror has become the stark reality of the integrated school," to
a 1989 issue of the NAAWP News in which he wrote that "There are plenty
of ways to intelligently slow down the non-white birth rate (by
stopping the welfare subsidization of it, for instance)."
Over
and over Duke states his position. It begins to sound like a mantra. "I
am working for the civil rights of white people. I am not anti-black. I
am pro-white."
In 1979, when he officially broke with the Klan,
turning over leadership of his faction to Don Black, who is now married
to Duke's ex-wife Chloe, Duke said in his letter of resignation: "I
came to the belief that the Klan wasn't the best path to victory. Under
those circumstances, the only honorable course of action I can take is
to step aside in my leadership role. On a personal level I remain
committed as ever to the white cause, and I will continue fighting with
what I believe to be the best approach."
Duke's best approach
has varied somewhat since his Klan days. He ran unsuccessfully as a
Democrat for the Louisiana State Senate in 1975 and 1979, in a district
that included a good chunk of District 81, and ran for President in
1988 as a member of the Populist Party–a party whose ranks include
founder Willis A. Carto, the man whose Institute for Historical Review
once offered a $50,000 reward for proof that the Holocaust actually
happened. In fact, Duke spoke this month at the Populist Party's
national committee meeting in Chicago–after he was elected to the
Louisiana State House as a Republican.
"The speaking engagement was a commitment I'd made before the election," Duke says now. "I had to honor it."
On
the surface, David Hedger Duke and his wife, the former Maxine Crick,
with their two children Dotti and David Ernest, looked like a Norman
Rockwell painting come to life.
As the younger David now
remembers it, he had " . . . a Beaver Cleaver childhood. We rode
bicycles," he says, "and we played baseball on the grounds of the
Baptist Seminary near my house. I even chipped my front tooth playing
football in the street."
David had a number of pets including
several snakes, 100 white rats he kept in the garage, and a favorite
dog named Frisky. He talks about how much he enjoyed his chemistry set,
his World War II model kits and listening to the Beatles.
Some
who knew the family remember that Maxine Duke was often absent from
school and church activities. "I don't ever remember seeing her," says
Wayne Arnold, who attended church with the Duke family and was one of
David's teachers at Clifton Ganus, the private Christian school David
attended in 8th and 9th grades.
Dotti Duke Wilkerson, David's
sister who was five years older than her brother, left home for college
when David was 12, and married in 1962. After she left, says Wilkerson,
44, her brother and mother were often alone.
Era of Vietnam
It
was the height of the Vietnam War and her father, a civil engineer by
trade, was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in
Southeast Asia.
Her father lived in Cambodia for 11 years,
Wilkerson says, starting when David was 14 or 15. "His job was to
rebuild the bridges the Viet Cong knocked out.
"My father was
conservative to the max," says Wilkerson, who lives in Sherwood, Ore.,
and is a regional coordinator for the Pacific-American Institute, which
brings Japanese students to the U.S. on exchange programs. "Much, much
more conservative than what you would now call a Reagan Republican. He
had served with Eisenhower and was very close to him. He was very much
into studying. If we had no homework, he'd give us three hours' worth
of reading to do. We had to read summers and before we could watch TV
on Saturdays. My brother David was very intense, very studious, a
bookworm. He took after my dad in that he was very politically minded.
"Our
father was very patriotic. He was never a member of the Klan. He never
expressed racist views, quite the opposite in fact. My father and
mother insisted that our black nannie, Pinkie, eat her meals at the
table with us. This was highly unusual in those days but my brother and
I both loved her. When she died, David and my mother were the only
white people at her funeral.
"When David got mixed up with the Klan my father was in Cambodia," says Wilkerson.
David's
version of how he came to his "racialist" views begins as a freshman in
high school. "In those days I held liberal views because that's the
pabulum that's fed to you," he says now. "Then one day a teacher
assigned me to take the anti-integration argument in a report because
she knew I was for it, and I finally found books like 'Race and Reason'
by Carlton Putnam, and that book had a big influence on me.
'Searching and Looking'
"I was serious and at that age you
want something to believe in and you want purpose and reason in life. I
was in the process of searching and looking."
The staff at
Clifton Ganus School, where Duke was given the assignment he now sees
as an epiphany, has been doing a lot of soul searching ever since Duke
began to tell this story. They seem bewildered by the possibility that
he could have acquired his views while under their care. Ganus was not
one of the white flight academies that sprang up after desegregation.
It has always encouraged minority enrollment.
"He was a good
student," says Wayne Arnold. "He never expressed racist views here at
Ganus. He was a normal kid. I coached him when he played basketball for
the Eagles."
But Arnold remembers something else. At Sunday
School when he was about 13, normally quiet David Duke unexpectedly and
forcefully argued that the Nazis had been right about the Jews, a stand
that stunned his teacher. "And he would not be swayed," says Arnold.
Clearly,
David's path seemed to be diverging from the mainstream. After
attending Ganus, he transferred to hulking, red brick Warren Easton
senior high in New Orleans. He spent only one year at this, the same
school attended by presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
For
his junior year, David was sent to Riverside Military Academy in
Gainesville, Ga. In the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains,
Riverside is, in the words of present principal Col. Jack Hall,
"designed for kids who're not achieving what their parents think they
could."
Hall says that interest in either Nazi or Klan beliefs
is rare among Riverside students. "The vast majority of them would find
the idea of running around in a sheet ridiculous and there are no
jackboots allowed."
Already in Klan
Nevertheless, by the time David finished his
senior year at John F. Kennedy, an academically high-powered integrated
public high school in New Orleans, he was already a member of the Klan.
"I joined the Klan at 17," Duke says.
In an era of political
theater, did Duke, anxious to oppose the hippies and anti-war activists
he saw as a threat to his own father, find an outlet in the precepts of
the Nazis and the Klan?
Says Duke's sister, "I suppose David saw
the Klan as the only vehicle he had to oppose all the people who were
opposed to the war. I know he didn't believe all the media coverage of
the KKK.
"When he found out, my father and the rest of us
opposed David's involvement with the Klan. We all knew that he had an
incredibly high IQ and we were afraid that he would wreck his life."
LSU
Prof. Carleton–in whose state history class Duke was "a good
student"–simply believes Duke had found his first leadership role. "In
the land of the blind," says Carleton, "the one-eyed man is king. And
David was much, much brighter than the average rural kid who becomes a
Klansman.
"I believe that there is a growing constituency
nationally among lower-income groups who believe that the unemployed or
the marginally employed are the enemy," says Carleton. "They believe
that expensive government is taking their money and giving it to
(those) who don't work. I believe Duke senses that groundswell and that
he's found a home in the Republican party because, by courting the
bigots in the last few elections, the Republicans have brought this
thing on themselves."
A Louisiana Republican Central Committee
member, who asked not to be identified, and who campaigned for Duke's
opponent John Treen, angrily concurs. "I think it's a disgrace to the
Republican party that there were such appeals to bigotry. There should
be no place for that in this party. We've been set back years in our
hope to appeal to minorities. Duke is taking advantage."
At
Tulane University, Duke's campaign literature has been added to the
school's impressive collection of "political ephemera." There it is
filed along with various Nazi and Klan publications–some so vicious,
violent and racist, says the committee member, as to qualify as
pornography. Some, she says, contain articles praising David Duke and
boasting that his is only the first of their causes' many coming
electoral victories.
And those electoral victories seem
increasingly less improbable. Listen to one of Duke's supporters, a
hard-working middle-aged white man. Angry, he emphasizes that he's been
paying taxes all his life.
"The Democrats got the (blacks) and
the poor. The Republicans got the rich. The middle-class, we got
nobody. That's why David got elected. Finally there's somebody for us."
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