By Guardian - John Ganz - Thu 25 Jul 2024 05.00 BST

On 21 January 1989, the day after George HW Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for the 81st legislative district of the Louisiana house of representatives.

In the 1970s, David Duke was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 80s, he was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives – and the kinds of ideas he stood for have not gone away.

Running as a Republican, he came out ahead of the state party’s preferred candidate, John Treen. Republican National Committee staff members went to Louisiana to bolster Treen’s faltering campaign and work against Duke. “We will do anything to defeat this man,” the Bush campaign manager and then RNC chief Lee Atwater declared to the Wall Street Journal.

The former and current Republican presidents endorsed Duke’s opponent and made advertisements on his behalf, to little avail: Duke would go on to win the runoff vote a month later and enter the state legislature. Over the next three years, Duke would aspire to higher and higher office.

These subsequent campaigns, unsuccessful though they were, garnered Duke an ever-expanding platform for himself and his cause, bedevilled the establishment, and suggested deep structural failures in American society and its political system. But how did Duke, previously an abject failure in personal and political life, come to defy the direction of his chosen party and represent the crack-up of an old order?

It was oil that brought the Dukes to Louisiana. David Hedger Duke, David’s father, originally from Kansas, was an engineer for Royal Dutch Shell who relocated his family to New Orleans after being stationed for a time in the Netherlands. Duke’s father was a deeply conservative Goldwater Republican and a harsh disciplinarian, and his mother was emotionally distant and an alcoholic. Duke was a lonely, unliked child – peers called him “Puke Duke” and refused to play with him. He retreated into books.

In 1964, at age 14, he became interested in a network of organisations, the Citizens’ Councils, which were formed across the US south in the 1950s to oppose school integration and voter registration. Duke began to hang out at the Citizens’ Council office in New Orleans and make himself a nuisance to the staff, who took pity on him when they learned of his unhappy home life.

When he showed up with a copy of Mein Kampf and started spouting off antisemitic opinions, members of the council would later say that they were horrified and tried to dissuade him from going full Nazi, but this version of events strains credulity. The group’s founder Leander Perez was hardly quiet about his antisemitism.

Duke’s devoted nazism did not improve his social life. At Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, he decorated his dorm room with a Nazi flag, a picture of Adolf Hitler, and German second world war propaganda.

It was at LSU where Duke began his political career, delivering tirades against the Jews in Free Speech Alley on campus, otherwise home to anti-war and other radical protesters in the late 1960s and early 70s. Photographs of Duke tramping around campus in his Nazi uniform from this time would prove to be an encumbrance when he later tried to clean up his image for mainstream politics.

Duke’s entire career would be characterised by attempts to simultaneously gain mainstream respect and be the predominant leader of the subcultural world of the Klan and neo-nazism. Until 1989, he would largely fail to accomplish either. In his bid to rebuild the Klan in the 1970s, he enjoined his lieutenants to avoid saying the N-word in public with the press present (an exhortation imperfectly heeded even by Duke himself) and to present themselves as a white civil rights organisation.

Duke preferred to appear in public in a coat and tie rather than the traditional white robes. He permitted women full membership. As was required for recruiting in southern Louisiana, Duke’s Klan also dropped the organisation’s traditional anti-Catholicism.

But Duke’s penchant for personal self-promotion alienated his lieutenants and supporters. During a failed state senate campaign, he fought with a deputy over a TV advertisement he wanted to air that showed him lifting weights in a tank top and short shorts; the dispute eventually led to the deputy’s resignation.

Equally embarrassing were the pseudonymous books he wrote and attempted to sell. The first, African Atto, was a fake martial arts guide for Black Power militants, written by one “Mohammed X”, that diagrammed various fighting moves to use against white opponents. Although he later offered different explanations, it seems like the book was part of a misbegotten moneymaking scheme. Duke’s other volume, Finders Keepers, was a guide to sex and dating for the modern single woman.

Written under the pseudonyms Dorothy Vanderbilt and James Konrad, the book advised ladies how to please their men, mostly with stuff cribbed from women’s magazines, equal parts revolting and banal. Duke had apparently hoped the book would become a bestseller and solve his financial difficulties, but it was an utter flop and further alienated his lieutenants, who quickly figured out that he wrote it.

The salient thing about the book is that, as one of his aides said, it was “too hardcore for the right wing and too softcore for the perverts”. This remark sums up the essence of the Duke phenomenon: he was caught between his desire for publicity and mainstream acceptance and his infatuation with the secretive underworld of extremism.

One piece of advice Duke offered in Finders Keepers is notable for having a real echo in his personal life: its exhortation for women to engage in extramarital affairs. In reality, Duke’s compulsive womanising had begun to put a strain on his relationship with his fellow Klansmen. One recalled, “We had to get David out. He was seducing all the wives.”

In 1979, Duke created the NAAWP, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a group ostensibly focused on discrimination against whites. But efforts to make his operation more respectable did not succeed. Friends report Duke going from table to table at a Sizzler steak house asking for donations for the NAAWP, paying the bill with what he could scrounge up, and then pocketing the rest. Meanwhile, he would have his daughters share a hamburger to save money.

Yet Duke did somehow manage to scrape together the money for plastic surgery. He went to Calvin Johnson, a top plastic surgeon in New Orleans, to get a nose reduction and chin implant. Then Duke underwent chemical peels to remove wrinkles around his eyes. Around the same time, while paying no income taxes because he claimed he did not meet the threshold, he was showing up in Las Vegas and playing craps for tens of thousands of dollars.

Duke doggedly ran for office, losing again and again. In 1988 he even ran for president on the ticket of the far-right Populist party activist and Holocaust denier Willis Carto and received 0.05% of the vote – but he did not give up. In 1989, he decided to contest the special election for Louisiana House District 81 in Metairie.

There were reasons why District 81 might be a particularly soft target for Duke. First of all, the district, plumped by white flight from New Orleans, was 99.6% white, petrified by the spectre of Black crime in the neighbouring metropolis. In addition, the state’s economic situation had significantly deteriorated during the Reagan years.

While some of the US experienced the 1980s as a delirious boom time, Louisiana faced double-digit unemployment, and the low price of oil throughout the decade hobbled the state’s relatively generous public spending. On top of the state’s oil woes, Metairie was a victim of the broader stagnation of middle-income wages that the entire country experienced in the 1980s.

When Duke began to make public appearances in Metairie, he found a receptive audience. Patrons at a working-class dive bar stood and applauded when Duke came through the door with campaign flyers. His appeal was not limited to downtrodden blue-collar white people; it crossed over, more quietly perhaps, into the precincts of middle-class respectability.

Now registered as a Republican, he was invited by the party’s branch in Jefferson Parish to address their candidates’ forum. Behind closed doors, he received a friendly welcome, with the state Republican party chairman slapping him on the back and praising his presentation.

Duke freely admitted to his past Klan membership, which, as he pointed out, he shared with many respectable public figures, including the long-serving senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, but he denied ever being a Nazi. When inconvenient photographs re-emerged of him in a brownshirt’s uniform on the LSU campus with a sign reading “Gas the Chicago 7”, Duke claimed that such antics constituted a “teenaged stunt” and “a satire” rather than “a defense of totalitarianism”.

Duke’s platform was shot through with thinly veiled anti-Black racism: he denounced “welfare dependency”, affirmative action, and minority “quotas”. He put a eugenic spin on these issues, calling for a reduction in “the illegitimate welfare birthrate that is bankrupting us economically and is the source of much crime and social ills”.

Duke was offering a standard Reagan-era conservative attack on welfare and affirmative action, aside from his willingness to touch the burning racial core of the issues. At the same time, he was attuned to the lower-middle-class homeowners he lived among: he also offered a full-throated defence of a property tax exemption for houses valued under $75,000.

Duke had the advantage of facing a divided field: there were four other Republicans running. According to Louisiana’s open primary rules, every candidate regardless of party ran on the same primary ballot, and then the top two faced each other in a runoff. John Treen, the brother of the former Republican governor David Treen, was a particularly vulnerable opponent for Duke. Both Treens had been involved in the segregationist movement as members of the Citizens’ Council and the States’ Rights party, a fact that made a principled rejection of Duke’s racism awkward at best, and made civil rights groups hesitant to assist Treen’s campaign.

In the first round of voting, Duke came in first with 33% of the vote; Treen came in second with 19%. New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan issued a statement to his parish priests to read at services before the runoff: “The election will determine the convictions of the voters of the district about the basic dignity of persons, the recognition of human rights of every person, the equality of races made by Divine Providence.”

Presumably, it was hoped that this moral message would resonate with the voters of the predominantly Catholic district. “This bishop in New Orleans, I never did like him,” Earline Pickett, the 75-year-old wife of a retired oil engineer, told the Washington Post. “He likes colored people. He says we should love colored people. But they’ve been different from the beginning, and God must have had a reason for making them that way.”

The intervention of the national GOP had very little effect either. A party that was run by Atwater was ill-equipped to repudiate Duke’s politics of bigotry. Atwater, after all, was the mastermind of Reagan’s Southern strategy, which aimed to win votes from southern white people resentful of integration. More recently, in the 1988 presidential election, Atwater had been behind the infamous Willie Horton ad, which used the image of a convicted rapist to stir up fear of Black crime. Their meddling just allowed Duke to further burnish his outsider credentials.

In February, the runoff vote was held. Turnout was unusually high for a local election: 78%. Duke edged Treen by 227 votes, thus winning office as a state representative. “If I had anything to say to people outside the state,” the author Walker Percy told the New York Times when they came down to report on the District 81 race, “I’d tell ’em, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.’”

The Republican National Committee voted to “censure” Duke, but the Louisiana state party ignored the resolution, despite the efforts of a Louisiana GOP activist named Beth Rickey to discredit him. She had followed Duke to a convention in Chicago and recorded a secret speech where he told the crowd of skinheads and Klansmen, “My victory in Louisiana was a victory for the white majority movement in this country.”

He concluded his speech: “Listen, the Republican party of Louisiana is in our camp, ladies and gentlemen. I had to run within that process, because, well, that’s where our people are.” Even when the press carried pictures of Duke shaking hands with the chairman of the American Nazi party, Louisiana Republicans did nothing.

The party was scared of Duke’s voters, who had reacted angrily when the national GOP tried to act against him. There may have been other reasons for the lack of initiative. “I began to suspect that there was more agreement with Duke on the race issue than I had heretofore believed,” Rickey later reflected. Duke thought so, too. “We not only agree on most of the issues,” he told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, “we’ve come to the point of friendship. They’ve accepted me. The voters have accepted me. The legislature has accepted me.”

Duke succeeded in continually getting mass media attention for himself. In November 1989, he appeared on ABC News’s Primetime Live with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer. The usually formidable Donaldson had trouble with the soapy Duke. Donaldson read out some of Duke’s writing, and Duke denied having written it or finessed it into a more respectable-sounding opinion. When pressed about writing that “Negros are lower on the evolutionary scale than Caucasians”, Duke replied, “Well, I don’t think I wrote that.

I do believe that there is a difference between whites and blacks. I think that there is an IQ difference. But I think the way to determine a person’s quality and qualifications is in the marketplace of ideas, through testing, for instance in universities, through applications for jobs.” (This opinion was gaining mainstream acceptance: in 1989 the solidly centre-right establishment American Enterprise Institute thinktank began funding the research of Charles Murray that would culminate in his cowritten book The Bell Curve, containing its own claims about race and IQ.)

Showing a newsletter Duke had distributed during his days as a blatant Nazi, which suggested partitioning the country into different ethnic enclaves, Donaldson pointed to part of a map that had Long Island set aside as a homeland for the Jews. The New York studio audience laughed; Duke’s plastic face curled into an innocent-looking smile – he found his way out: “Sir, that map is tongue-in-cheek.”

Duke encouraged viewers to write him at his Baton Rouge office. The volume of mail that poured in shocked the statehouse staff; it was more than they had seen for any other legislator. (The other feature on Primetime Live that night was Donald Trump, ranting about Japanese investment in the US economy, under the headline “Who Owns America?”)

In 1990, at large, raucous rallies across the state, Duke parlayed his high profile into a US Senate race against the uninspiring conservative Democrat J Bennett Johnston. Duke won 43.5% of the vote to Johnston’s 54%. Johnston’s victory was due to the fact that he won nearly the entire Black vote. But Duke netted 59% of the white vote. Duke’s election night party at a Lions Club outside New Orleans was practically a victory celebration. There was much to look forward to: next year the governor would be up for reelection.

“I will swing the pendulum back,” Duke told the small crowd at the announcement for his candidacy at the Hilton in Baton Rouge. No more “welfare abuse”, no more affirmative action, no more social programs for the “underclass”, but “more prisons”, an end to desegregation busing, and the death penalty for drug dealers. It would also be a liberation from the strictures of political correctness, a win for freedom of expression. “Don’t you see?” Duke told his followers. “You’ll be more free to say whatever you want to say, man or woman, if I’m elected.”

As the 1991 election neared, the governor, conservative Democrat Charles Roemer, had good reason to feel confident. Early polling showed him comfortably ahead of his main opponents, David Duke and former governor Edwin Edwards, also a Democrat. Roemer had defeated Edwards in 1987 with a pledge to clean up the government. Edwards was amiable, fun, but he could not be called clean. First elected in 1972, he had been the first candidate since Reconstruction to campaign for the Black vote; he fused Louisiana’s downtrodden ethnic minorities into a powerful coalition with organised labour.

While the good times rolled, that public tolerated Edwards’ excesses: the womanising, the gambling, the insider deals and corruption. But when Edwards returned to office in 1983, he failed to bring back the good old days of the 70s: the state’s fiscal straits were too dire, and he was forced to jam through budget cuts instead of expansive giveaways to an adoring populace.

Roemer, a graduate of Harvard Business School, appealed to the public with his combination of technocratic competence and anger at corruption. But he was aloof, ill-suited for the glad-handing style of Louisiana politics. It turned out that eliminating corruption alone couldn’t rescue the state’s fiscal situation.

Despite these disappointments, Roemer still harboured some ambitions. In early 1991, he switched his party affiliation to Republican. The national GOP was happy to bolster the ranks of the Louisiana party with non-Duke Republicans, and for Roemer, the attraction was equally clear: with Bush’s popularity soaring as a result of the Gulf war, any association with the president seemed like a vote-winner.

Although the open primary system meant anyone could run, the GOP held a caucus and endorsed Clyde Holloway, a rock-ribbed fundamentalist who was popular with the state’s evangelicals and anti-abortion community. But Duke demanded to address the caucus. After attempting to forestall Duke’s speech, party leaders relented to the crowds, who were chanting, “Duke! Duke! Duke!” The leaders were shocked by the frenzy. “It’s like we’re attending a party convention in Germany in the 1930s and Hitler is coming to power,” a longtime GOP operative confided.

Though Duke never successfully passed a bill as a legislator, he scored a partial victory in the 1991 session. He had proposed a bill to offer mothers on welfare $100 a year to have a birth control implant. In the end, the measure was watered down to just provide information about birth control. There was very little ambiguity in what was meant by “welfare mothers”. At a rally, Duke said, “The greatest problem facing this state is the rising welfare underclass,” and the crowd yelled back the n-word. Duke pretended not to hear. But when he trotted out similar lines at a Kiwanis or a veterans’ hall, he received polite applause.

David Duke was an implausible tribune for the overburdened taxpayer. The Times-Picayune reported that he had not paid property taxes for three years. But charges of hypocrisy could not damage Duke, who had a strange power to make voters alter their opinions to fit him. Roemer’s staff organised a focus group of white, blue-collar swing voters from Jefferson Parish.

They were asked a series of questions about a hypothetical candidate who had dodged the draft, avoided taxes, had plastic surgery and never held a job. The group reviled the imaginary pol. But when the same questions were asked naming Duke, the group grew testy and defended him. (“Only dumb people pay taxes,” one woman said. “Politicians and millionaires don’t because they are smart. Duke must be smart.”)

Despite the evidence, Roemer simply could not imagine that Duke had mass appeal, and believed the polls that said he was comfortably ahead. He refused to air attack ads, and he spent the last Sunday before the election watching football. Edwards ran first with 33.7%, Duke second with 31.7%, and Roemer third with 26.5%. The incumbent governor had finished third and was now out of the race. Although Edwards was in the lead, he faced challenges in the runoff.

Edwards was unsettled by the degree of rancour Duke could inspire. At a debate in front of the state convention of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Edwards discovered how deep the Duke appeal went. Edwards promised improvements in services for seniors; the crowd wasn’t interested, but they lapped up Duke’s lines about the illegitimate birthrate and the welfare underclass.

Edwards tried to appeal to facts: “A welfare mother only receives an extra $11 a week with each extra child she bears. Can you see a woman sitting around the kitchen table scheming to get pregnant to get another $11 a week?” The crowd shouted back, “Yes!” Edwards protested: “He’s appealing to your base emotions. Who is going to be next? The disabled? The old? You better think about it.” He was drowned out by boos. The Louisiana AARP endorsed Duke.

But Duke soon came under assault from all sides, as if the immune system of the state and the nation was activated against a pathogen. Money poured into the Edwards campaign. Business interests aligned themselves with the Democratic candidate. Civil society groups focused on surfacing Duke’s past statements on race and the Jews. The press grew more aggressive against him. Even Roemer gave a full-throated endorsement of Edwards, his former foe.

The massive onslaught yielded ambiguous results. Some polls showed Edwards ahead at just 46% to 42%; Duke was dominating the white vote with 58%. When pressed about Duke’s past, voters responded that Edwards, too, had an unsavoury past. “We know about Duke’s past, we know about Louisiana’s future, we know he doesn’t care for negroes, we know he won’t get along with the legislature and, just maybe, we like it!” one voter wrote to the Times-Picayune.

Again, Duke had no problem attracting media coverage, particularly on TV. “Broadcast is always better,” Duke said. On TV he could avoid the two great enemies of demagogues: context and memory. If questioned too sharply, he could just play the victim. Here was this nice-looking, clean-cut guy being badgered by some snooty journalist.

He always got his message across, one way or another: “I just think white people should have equal rights, too.” Now what was so unreasonable sounding about that? He could also just flat-out lie. He told a weekend anchor on a network affiliate in New Orleans that he had polled 8-12% of the Black vote in Louisiana – he was not pressed on it.

“Take it from someone who has spent most of his adult life working in this medium,” Ted Koppel lectured sternly into the camera at the start of ABC’s Nightline. “Television and Duke were made for each other.” Then Nightline proceeded to give him 30 minutes of free airtime. Duke did Larry King Live and The Phil Donahue Show in ’91. Phil Donahue and his audience yucked it up to Duke’s jokes. The Times-Picayune called his Larry King appearance “a solid hour of largely uninterrupted propaganda and uncontradicted lies”.

Contributions trickled in to Duke from around the country. He was breaking through to people who would not necessarily move in the Holocaust denial and KKK subcultures. He started to get small envelopes of $5, $20, $40. A retired schoolteacher in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe: “I like the fact that he thinks that everyone should get an even break – white or black or Jewish or anything else.

I think we have had a lot of antiwhite racism.” George Marcou of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a retired brewery engineer, told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t really think he is a racist. Either that or I’m blind. There are probably things we’ve all done that we’re sorry for.” And William J Zauner of Brookfield, Wisconsin: “He’s saying what a lot of people are thinking.”

In their first debate together, the surprisingly slick David Duke wrongfooted Edwards. With the last debate on 6 November, Edwards would make sure it would not happen again. He began smoothly, rattling off facts and figures about the state in his warm Cajun drawl, with a friendly, optimistic mien, a performance Duke could not match. Duke mostly held his own for the first half hour, then he started to get rattled.

One of the panellists, Jeff Duhe, a political correspondent for Louisiana Public Broadcasting, asked, “Mr Duke, you claim and appear to be a spokesperson for the common man and his common ideals. Since high school, could you please describe the jobs you’ve had and the experience they’ve given you to run a $9bn organisation such as the state of Louisiana?”

Duke fumbled with the answer, citing a long-ago teaching job in Laos, various small-business efforts and political campaigns. “Are you saying you’re a politician and you run for office as a job?” Duhe pressed. Duke became agitated and angry, citing the efficiency of his campaign. Edwards piled on: “Fella never had a job! He worked for nine weeks as an interpreter in Laos and then they fired him because he couldn’t understand anybody. He has been in seven campaigns in eight years, he won one. Is that an efficient kind of campaign? Heaven help us if that’s the kind of efficiency he’s gonna bring to state government.”

Then it was the turn of panellist Norman Robinson, a Black correspondent for WDSU-TV in New Orleans. “Mr Duke, I have to tell you that I am a very concerned citizen. I am a journalist, but first and foremost I am a concerned citizen,” Robinson began slowly, with deliberate passion. “And as a minority who has heard you say some very excoriating and diabolical things about minorities, about blacks, about Jews, about Hispanics, I am scared, sir …

I have heard you say that Jews deserve to be in the ash bin of history, I’ve heard you say that horses contributed more to the building of America than blacks did. Given that kind of past, sir, given that kind of diabolical, evil, vile mentality, convince me, sir, and other minorities like me, to entrust their lives and the lives of their children to you.”

Duke tried to play down his record – as having been “too intolerant at times” – but Robinson would not relent: “We are talking about political, economic genocide. We’re not talking about intolerance … As a newfound Christian, a born-again, are you here willing now to apologise to the people, the minorities of this state, whom you have so dastardly insulted, sir?”

Duke gave an impatient apology and tried to change the subject to reverse racism. Robinson tried to get Duke to admit that there was racism against Black people. “Look, Mr Robinson, I don’t think you are really being fair with me.” Robinson: “I don’t think you are really being honest, sir.” Duke sputtered, lost his temper, and never regained composure.

On Election Day, 16 November 1991, Black voters turned out at a rate of 78%. The result was a blowout: Edwards 61%, Duke 39%. Still, Duke won 55% of the white vote statewide. And despite it being revealed during the campaign that he had made up the “Evangelical Bible Church” he’d said he attended, he won 69% of white evangelical and fundamentalist voters. He had also taken 56% of Cajuns, who had once flocked to their champion Edwards.

Edwards addressed a jubilant crowd at New Orleans’s Monteleone Hotel. “I ask the nation, the national press, I ask all those whose opinions we respect to write and say of us that Louisiana rejected the demagogue and renounced the irrational fear, the dark suspicion, the evil bigotry and the division and chose a future of hope and trust and love for all of God’s children,” the white-haired governor-elect roared triumphantly, in the cadences of a time gone by.

“Prophecy is reserved for those who are given that special gift, which I do not possess. But I say to all of America tonight, there will be other places and other times where there will be other challenges by other David Dukes. They too will be peddling bigotry and division as their elixir of false hope, they too will be riding piggyback on the frustration of citizens disaffected by government …

We must address the causes of public disenchantment with government at every level … Tonight Louisiana defeated the darkness of hate, bigotry and division, but where will the next challenge come from? Will it be in another campaign in Louisiana? Or in a campaign for governor in some other state? Or a campaign for president of the United States?”

Adapted from When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, published by FSG

Editors comments

Having no friends in his childhood and school days he created a nasty lifestyle in order to create attention, beeing first a Ku Klux Klan leader and later a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and then finished first in an open primary for the 81st legislative district of the Louisiana house of representatives. No wonder the US politics are i a turmoil, not being of benefit to the people.