Put Up Your Dukes!

November 19, 1991

Should we be content that David Duke lost to Edwards by a wide margin, 61% to 39%? Or is it a continuing threat to fair play and constitutional government that nearly 700,000 voters in Louisiana voted for Duke? The polling reports indicate that one out of every two White voters cast their ballots for Duke. The result of the election would have been different if there had not been a surprisingly large turn-out by Black voters who perceived and still perceive that racism is alive and virulent in our country. If you dismiss the matter as a Louisiana phenomenon, remember that substantial amounts of financial support, perhaps close to 50%, for the Duke campaign came from outside that State. Duke has already indicated that he has plans to run for national political office.

Why worry about David Duke? For good reasons, I believe. He has a record of loyalty to Fascist ideology. He was an outspoken admirer of Adolph Hitler. Duke was an anti-Semite. He denied that the Holocaust ever occurred. He was a racist in his view of Black people. His bigotry and repetition of falsehoods are reminiscent of what Isabella said to Angelo (MEASURE FOR MEASURE, Act II, Sc. 2)

“... but man, proud man.
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured -
his glassy essence – like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep...”

The same description applies to Duke. In the campaign he disavowed his Fascist ideology, his anti-Semitism, his racism. But most people did not believe him. President Bush took the unusual stand of rejecting Duke and recommending voters to cast their ballots for the nominee of the Democratic party. Mary Matalin, chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, was quoted, “Every right-thinking person in the inter-planetary system sees him for what he is.”

But what bothers me is that an unknown number of the thousands voted for Duke precisely for that reason – they shared his bigoted and Fascist views. To be sure, there were other reasons for a Duke vote: disenchantment and distrust of Governor Edwards, who was by no means an excellent candidate; feelings of powerlessness about the depressive reality of Louisiana’s economic condition; fears that things would become worse. However, not to recognize that bias and prejudice can reap a harvest of votes in the U.S.A. is to be naively ignorant.

This has happened before. In my boyhood I was unaware and untutored about the power of the Ku Klux Klan. If I had some notion that Klansmen ate ham gravy with grits while singing “Dixie,” and tying the noose on the lynching rope, I was wrong. Such was true among some elements in the South, but Klan influence was powerful in the North. I am indebted to an enlightening book, REBELLION AGAINST VICTORIANISM, by Stanley Coben, for significant history.

In the early 1920s, the Klan had at least three million members. “At the height in 1924, Southerners formed only 16% of the total membership. 40% lived in three Midwestern states: Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. The Klan enrolled more members in Connecticut than in Mississippi, more in Oregon than Louisiana, more in New Jersey than in Alabama.” Members were native, white, Protestant males. KKK rhetoric reflected still widely-accepted Victorian ideas about a racial hierarchy and about the dangers to American society posed by Catholics, Blacks, Jews, and Asians. But the KKK did not have success in the largest cities. Irish Catholic Mayor of New York City, John F. Hylan, “I would have you treat this group of racial and religious haters as you would Reds and bomb-throwers. Drive them out of our city.” The Chicago City Council voted 56 to 2 to rid Chicago's municipal payroll of Klansmen.

Perhaps because I was born and raised in the Boston area, my lack of knowledge was understandable. James Michael Curley, Mayor of Boston, banned Klan meetings in Boston.

Klan membership soon declined from the 1924 peak. Reasons advanced included the reality that when Klansmen were elected to legislatures (even a governorship), the rash and passionate rhetoric could not be enacted into laws. Furthermore, there was some corruption in KKK high offices; stealing membership money, for example, disillusioned many members. Add to that at least one notorious murder by a Klan official.

Yet there are examples of prejudice voiced by national leaders who were not (as far as I know) Klansmen. There are well-documented citations in THE POLITICS OF UNREASON, by Lipset and Raab. A few quotations will reflect the tone of the times:

P. 142: “Writing in “Good Housekeeping” magazine, Calvin Coolidge, then Vice-President-elect, argued that ‘biological laws show us that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.’ James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor under both Harding and Coolidge, went even further to argue that the older Nordic immigrants ‘were the beaver type that built up America, whereas the newer immigrants were rat-men trying to tear it down; and obviously rat-men could never become beavers.’”

“As Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover declared in a speech to the Poles of Buffalo that ‘immigrants now lived in the United States on sufferance ... and would be tolerated only if they behaved.’”

P.143: “In June 1922, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard openly advocated, in his graduation address, quotas designed to limit the number of Jewish students. Although the Overseers of Harvard turned down the proposal, many other universities were following such policies at the time.”

One of my memories is of my mother’s brother-in-law, Frank Crimmins, who was upset when he saw a Hoover poster in her window during the 1928 campaign. Uncle Frank, an Irish Catholic, was intensely aware of the vicious anti-Catholic campaign directed against the nominee of the Democratic Party, Governor Al Smith. I don’t know if he persuaded her. When I could cast my first vote in 1932, I sure did not vote for Hoover but for F.D.R. Never for a moment have I ever regretted that choice.

I do remember the 1930s and the rise of Fascist and Neo-Fascist organizations with their hatred and bigotry against Catholics, Blacks, Jews, Socialists and “Liberals.” Anti-Semitic venom was wide-spread, not less among “good” citizens. As Hitler came to prominence and then power, there was adulation and imitation here in our country.

The German-American Bund acquired not only notoriety but followers with its glorification of Hitler, storm-troopers and mass meetings.

Followers flocked to the Silver Shirts, Gerald Winrod, Gerald L.K. Smith and other peddlers and preachers of bigotry.

Father Coughlin, the “Radio Priest” while obviously not Anti-Catholic, preached anti-Semitic diatribes to large listening audiences until he was finally silenced by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Detroit.

No one should be overly astonished at these historical recollections. The seeds of prejudice usually find some fertile ground. In times of trouble and economic uncertainty, many persons are gripped by fear. A job is a terrible thing to lose when other opportunities are scarce or non-existent. In the gloomy miasma of the Great Depression, I remember clearly men express panic that if a job was lost, they might never work again, ever! If this sounds unbelievable, you weren’t there.

In such times, people look for a scapegoat. To quote Adlai Stevenson, “a hungry man is an angry man.” To vent that anger on a minority group, person or other innocent target is neither fair nor just, but it happens that scapegoating is a ritual of psychological sedation or release.

An additional cause is the persistence of the Victorian attitude described by Stanley Coben in the book I cited. The upper-middle and upper classes were caste societies: Women were subordinated and acculturated to obey and keep their “place.” They could not vote. Immigrants were looked down upon. The Irish were housemaids and laborers. Jews, Blacks, Asians, Italians, lived in enclaves (ghettos). The American Indians were forced onto reservations. (Thereby, the WASP culture could appropriate the name “native” for themselves.) The victims of the Victorian caste system experienced discrimination in jobs, education, politics. Coben’s studies led him to the conclusion that this attitude continued into the 20th century and was an important factor in the growth of the Klan in the North.

Thus, an important question is raised – why do so many persons need to look down upon others – to subordinate them, to slander them, to belittle them, to fear them, to be paranoid about goals of those who not yet have received proper recognition and fair reward for their labors? Are the social/ cultural/economic/political factors I have partially described a sufficient explanation? My hunch is “NO.” Is there a dark well in our natures from which such a poisonous fountain flows? Are there crude polluted passions spurting from the “ID”? Could this under-conscious be another interpretation of “Original Sin” about which theologians ponder? If my dear friends, Al and Rose read this, I would welcome their observations based on their deep experience and wide knowledge. I know neither of you is a doctrinaire Freudian, but consider what Norman Brown noted in LOVE’S BODY: (p.81)

“The unification of the human race: a mental fight, a struggle in and about men’s mind. The rents, the tears, splits and divisions are mindmade; they are not based on the truth but on what the Buddhist calls illusion, what Freud calls unconscious fantasies. The prevailing sense of reality, the prevailing forms of knowledge, are ruled by the instinct of aggression, are under the domination of the death instinct...”

What think you?

Consider, if you will, what historian, the late Barbara Tuchman, wrote in “Historical Clues to Present Discontents,” (in loc, PRACTISING HISTORY),

“Even before 1914, a whole school of English political philosophers and social psychologists, including Graham Wallas, author of the phrase, ‘The Great Society,’ was overtaken by pessimism as a result of their studies of mass political behavior. One of them, William Trotter, in his book INSTINCTS OF THE HERD IN PEACE AND WAR, published in 1908, found the mob or herd instinct springing from the same dark and sinister well of of the unconscious uncovered by Freud. Describing the herd instinct as an irrational force, ‘imitative, cowardly, cruel ... and suggestible,’ Trotter concluded his famous essay with one of the most somber sentences ever written, ‘The probability is very great that, after all, man will prove but one more of Nature's failures.’”

Few of us could endure living with such a gloomy prospect. Yet to ignore the irrational in mass behavior is to wear glasses that are too rose-colored. I don’t see an analyst’s couch large enough for irrational cohorts.

Nevertheless, I must still assert, “Put up your Dukes!” Much as I detest racism and bigotry, I would not silence them, repress them, or deter their running for public office. Bigots have the same rights of freedom of speech and assembly.

Authentic goals deserve openness and advocacy. Bigotry must be challenged; lies must be exposed. If those of us who believe more strongly in the worth of all persons are defeated, perhaps such will be a consequence not of our ideals but our idleness in the face of threat.