The Soap Box, The Ballot Box, The Jury Box and The Cartridge Box

I stopped in at Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel recently, exactly eight years after the Democratic National Convention. The Yippies and their banner--a Vietcong flag--were noticeably absent. In their stead was another party and another banner: the American Independent Party and its emblem, a large American eagle--made of styrofoam.

These were the birds, remember, who had taken the unrest of that 1968 convention, fueled it into a protest vote for George Wallace, and helped coronate Richard Nixon. Wallace himself was not here. Most delegates to this year's convention felt he had 'sold out to the pointy-headed bureaucrats' by endorsing Jimmy Carter. But his legacy remained, and that, combined with rumors of a rising conservative tide, gave the convention some respectability as it opened.

The gathering was to be a coalition of the already-think ranks of third party conservatives. The fat-cat, somber-looking pin-striped remnants of the Reagan crusade, shunned by the Republican Party in Kansas City, were here to build a 'New Majority' on the structure of the American Independent Party. For a week they had been on the phone to Reaganites but, as a prominent conservative told me, not one Republican office-holder defected. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson, Illinois Congressman Phillip Crane--none set foot in the Hilton. 'National Review' editor William Rusher and direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie, leaders of the coalition movement, groped around and finally found a candidate in Robert Morris, a McCarthy era witch hunter who heads a nearly defunct Texas college and came to the convention as a newspaper columnist. But Morris was not equal to the task of creating a "New Majority," and the rank and file AIP members prevailed with one of their own, someone who had "labored in the vineyards," former Georgia governor Lester Maddox.

"The kooks won," said the chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom as Maddox snared the nomination, dashing any hopes for conservative unity this fall. And so the articulate smoothies of the Right took their money, donor lists, and relatively rational following and left Chicago a day early--their hopes buried in a large pile of Lester Maddox's racially symbolic pickhandles--pickhandles with which Maddox had little hope of denting fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter's armor.

As that scenario materialized, I began to understand that this convention was more a cultural gathering than a political one--Windy City softball when lined up against the hard-hitting major parties. The questions it raised were not questions of pragmatism or power but questions of an almost anthropological sort. Some could be raised by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Just how were the "kooks," like the rich, different from you and me? Were some of these people not 'kooks?' Where did strongly held principles leave off and 'kookism' begin? What were its manifestations?

I set out in search of the kookism in its various degrees, determined to record the rhetoric and perversities that gave life to this bush league convention.

***

It's Wednesday evening and Homer Marquis is an early arrival Illinois delegate. He talks about Communist control of the Democratic and Republican parties. He asks just how much I know about "that Council on Foreign Relations they got doin' all those evil things." Homer can't tell me his hometown because "those bastards will come and throw stones at my house." Questions about the identify of the 'bastards' go unanswered. "I'm saying all this to help you, young fella," he explains, gripping my shoulder and asking for my address, so as to pass along some literature about Jimmy Carter's cocaine connection.

Mrs. William Gordon of Nebraska, who declines to give her own first name, wastes no time in getting to the point. Rockefeller and Kissinger are at the top of many delegates' pariah lists and she is no exception. Rocky, she says, is running the country and the world through his international Zionist organization that operates in cahoots with the Rothschilds in France and royalty in the Netherlands. "They meet once a year in unknown places." Agents include Kissinger and Carter, and now that Reagan has joined the Council on Foreign Relations, Mrs. Gordon is not so sure about him. Furthermore, the Rockefellers are Jewish and have changed their name many times over the years.

She adds that 'Rosen and Felt' were responsible for the death of J. Edgar Hoover.

Later in the week, these and other similar charges will become more than the mere frothings of a few delegates when John Couture, a member of the convention committee, says in his keynote address that Zionism is the "most insidious, far-reaching, murderous force the world has ever known," and that it "started two world wars" and is ready for a third.

Jack Dembrowski and Bernie Shannon of Stoughton, Massachusetts, don't buy all that stuff. "I only go so far down the road, then I take a left and they take a right," jocular Bernie says.

Both Bernie and Jack say they are basically Democrats. Jack claims he drove 400 miles to President Kennedy's funeral; he voted for McGovern because he opposed the war. Bernie was a great admirer of Bobby. But now Jack is running Bernie's campaign against Edward Kennedy in the Massachusetts senatorial primary.

"When we (immigrants) came over we didn't expect to be taken care of, fed from the golden calf," Jack says, and Bernie notes that Teddy Kennedy has inverted his brother's 'Ask not...' philosophy. Jack figures while he's in town he might get in touch with Jesse Jackson, whom he admires for what he sees as his anti--handout mentality. Both delegates feel blacks should be included in the party so as to broaden its base, but, as the events of the week soon prove, these views go unheeded.

Some of the other positions they hold, however, are shared by fellow delegates, and as I sit and talk at length with Bernie, Jack and Daniel Eller, a former professor of Music at Eastern Michigan University who quit because of the "Marxist orientation of the department," I learn if there is one issue that really drives them it's the pro-life movement.

Jack talks of Chicago's Mayor Daley and points out that until he got into town that morning he thought the Mayor was a good man. But as he got off the plane and picked up a newspaper he realized that Daley, in criticizing Cardinal Cody for his stand in favor of an anti-abortion amendment, was not committed to the right to life. "This is the most important decision since slavery," Jack, a lawyer says, comparing the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion to the infamous Dred Scott case in which a black slave was held to be the property of his owner. "This issue will be the rise and fall of many," Bernie says, because "abortion is a denial of the Judeo-Christian emphasis of the Founding Fathers. They assumed that those who interpreted the law would be of this ethic. The Human Life Amendment will be the last great document of Western Civilization--like God speaking the Abraham, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation."

There is no venom, just passion, and throughout the week we remain friends. Like others, Bernie and Jack leave the convention when Maddox is nominated.

***

GOD RIGHTS YOU CONSTITUTION GOVERNMENT

"It took two years for me to design that model," Arman Mohtz '62 tells me, asking that I pay careful attention to the fact that 'government' is in a box and at the bottom. Mohtz likes to think of himself as a 'constitutionalist' rather than a conservative. Like many other delegates, he totes several copies of the Constitution around with him at all times. He opens one. "Congress shall make no law abridging..." Mohtz, a squat little man, gets excited. "That limitation's not on you, not on me, it's on Congress." He tells me of his campaign for Congress in 1974 when he ran under the slogan: "Get the bureaucrat's hands out of your pocket and nose out of your business." But that part of his life is all over. Now he helps run the United States Taxpayers Union and plans for a tax strike.

Mohtz recalls that he first became disenchanted with Harvard when he took courses on the Far East from John Fairbank '29, Higginson: Professor of History. Fairbank attacked General Douglas MacArthur and Mohtz objected. "What I thought then was proved in the '50s, of course," Mohtz says, noting that Fairbank was cited as a Communist sympathizer.

Before leaving, I asked Mohtz if he had any contact with Harvard anymore. Not since he discovered that half Harvard's trustees were on 'The Council,' he said.

The discussion drifts to Harvard, where he graduated as a Biology major. He asks if I know anything about the politics of the department there and I tell him of the debate between those who believe behavioral traits are inherited and others who say such things are determined by one's environment. "You mean totalitarianism vs. liberty," Mohtz says. I dare not ask which is which but it soon becomes apparent he believes only totalitarians try to mold people contrary to the designs of their souls.

Thursday the convention opens. I secure a press pass but it doesn't mean much. No one guards the door to the convention hall itself and press conferences are punctured by partisan applause and arguments between non-media onlookers and the speaker. The press is amused for a time, but by week's end tires of the circus.

I move over to talk to the chairman of the Illinois delegation, Harold Wilber, a real estate subdivider. Wilber fills me in on the split in the Illinois movement between the American Independent and the American Independence Parties. Both are here together today, however, even though their combined petitions are not enough to get a candidate on the Illinois ballot. Wilber looks forward to a court ruling on a ballot suit brought by Gene McCarthy and hopes the decision will help them too. Later in the week, a decision is handed down in favor of McCarthy but does not apply directly to the AIP. Nonetheless, Illinois delegates and others have nothing but kind words for the third party efforts of their strange bedfellow, that pied piper of 1968.

As Wilber begins to tell me of his admiration for Calvin Coolidge (Herbert Hoover was another convention favorite), his wife appears and asks about a man who has just walked into the hotel and wants to be a delegate. Wilber instructs her to have him pay his money, sign in, and wait for some brief questioning. Convention officials make no secret of any of this. The next day, when the roll call for president reaches Maine, a debate between the state chairman and convention secretary ensues over whether Maine has paid $100 each for the number of delegates they claim.

But this is the first day of the convention and the delegates are excited: waving flags, crying "hear! hear!", reveling in a pale imitation of the pageantry of a real national convention. 'Register Kissinger not Firearms,' 'The Rock Owns a Piece of Me,' and 'Don't Re-elect Anybody' bumper stickers; dead-babies' ingarbage-cans armbands; plastic gold noose lapel pins (for 'Public Officials convicted for treason'); pistol tie clips, etc., etc.

The speeches contained few surprises. The anti-gun control, anti-busing, anti-abortion, anti-ERA, anti-homosexuality, anti-big government platform is predictable enough. Someone wants the telephone tax removed as an infringement of free speech; revenue sharing, foreign aid, and the graduated income tax get canned; the Maddox people condemn the 55 mph speed limit as unconstitutional--standard conservative fare in sum, but proof that the creative reactionary is still alive and well.

On this day, the gut issues are discussed. Woody Jenkins of Louisiana reminds the audience of the four great American protections: "the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box. If you ever lose the cartridge box, the other three won't mean a thing." He recalls that the Japanese decided not to invade the West Coast in World War II because they knew the futility of doing battle with an armed citizenry.

Young Janine Hansen of Nevada decries ERA as a plot to destroy the family. Her family is a significant one at this convention--they make up five of the nine members of the Nevada delegation. Soon, it becomes apparent that this is representative of much of the convention--a gathering of family and friends active in this sort of thing since the Wallace crusade of 1968 and resentful of highbrow outsiders from the aborted Reagan campaign.

Colonel John Warnock of Arkansas rises to address the convention on the subject of 'America in Jeopardy.' Chief Justice Earl Warren was "the worst thing that ever happened" to the United States. "When he lay in state in the Supreme Court building" Warnock thundered, "over one million Negroes were in walking distance but only 300 showed up to pay their respects." He goes on to bemoan the fact that there are "500,000 people in Chicago who don't even speak English" and lament that "the more mixed blood in hospitals, the more hepatitis there will be."

At the end of the session, a short period is allowed for delegates to sound off. (AIP-members pride themselves on being democratic, although many will not use the word because "the Founding Fathers did not.") Michael Jacobs, a delegate from Vermont, objects to the racial overtones of Colonel Warnock's remarks and notes that such overtones will harm the party's efforts to broaden its base. "How many niggers you got in Vermont?" a man shouts out. I peer over at the only black face in the room--that of a young security guard. He remains impassive. A burly, slightly drunk Ohioan goes to the microphone to make his contribution. "The Panama Canal is as much ours as Alaska or the Louisiana Purchase... We should make it the 51st state."

Outside the convention hall, former Louisiana Congressman John Rarick holds an impromptu press conference. Leaning on one leg and looking very cocky in his white shoes and gray, dry-look pompadour, Rarick, who gained a reputation as one of the most anti-Semitic men in Congress, discusses his hopes to run as an AIP candidate for president and Congress simultaneously in November. A reporter from the Boston Globe raises the possibility that such a move might be illegal. Rarick looks puzzled and says he hasn't considered that. Another question. Busing. Ah yes! A smile. If Catholics and Protestants were to be successfully bused in Northern Ireland, Arabs and Israelis in the Mid-East, and Turks and Greeks on Cyprus--then Rarick might consider accepting busing in this country.

Friday is the big day. Maddox struts into a press conference, proclaims "I am a segregationist," calls Carter "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and argues with a black reporter about white rule in South Africa.

Over a drink up in the one-typewriter, one-telephone press room, Ned Young, Maddox's campaign director ("'manager' sounds too offensive") tells me the real story behind the pickhandle legend. "The Governor used to own a place called the Pickrick Restaurant and the handles were sold as souvenirs--4000 in two days one time--like those rocks they sell." I begin comparing the little innocuous pet rocks I know with the famed pickhandles and what I had heard about them when Young interrupted my thoughts to remind me once again that there was nothing symbolic about the pickhandle. "He never actually wielded a pickhandle, now did he?" Young asks. "You ever seen a picture of that?" I had to confess that I hadn't, although I did remember a photo of Maddox wielding a gun when chasing blacks away from his restaurant.

Young goes on to discuss Jimmy Carter's attitude toward Maddox when the latter served under Carter as lieutenant governor. "Carter sent word for Maddox to come see him after the inauguration. He said, 'I need no assistance from you whatsoever. If you oppose the governor's office, we will destroy you.'"

I head upstairs to where Maddox is scheduled to address several midwestern delegations. The elevator fills up and an elderly man shoots me a quick "Hello young fella." I bait him. "Mr. Maddox, what would you have done if this was 1968 and there were demonstrators downstairs?" "I think Mayor Daley did the right thing," Lester Maddox says, emerging from the elevator to tell the crowd "regardless of where everyone else stands today, I'll still be Lester Maddox tomorrow."

Maddox delegate Louis Kuynyo shifts from one foot to another as a boyish Fatty Arbuckle at his side snaps Maddox's picture. "I just cross my fingers we don't have another Wallace on our hands," Kuynyo' whispers.

Downstairs, one of the natty Reaganite interlopers, Howard Phillips '62, beckons me over to talk. Phillips, a bright and articulate man who helped found the Young Americans for Freedom shortly after leaving Harvard, is a former director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He claims to have convinced Nixon to dismantle OEO but became disenchanted upon discovering that the Administration was not as committed as he to ending such federal programs. Phillips believes that federal funds are presently being used for welfare rights organizations, gay liberation, rent strikes and so forth. Most Americans are "common sense, non-ideological conservatives," he says, "They are patriotic, concerned about national defense, worried about inflation and a balanced budget." But most conservatives, according to Phillips, are Democrats; thus the movement can't work through the Republican Party. "They have to know you're not Watergate and Herbert Hoover," he explains. Hence the new party attempt at the AIP convention.

Phillips admits failure for the time being. Now is just not the time for this clan. The AIP isn't ready for an assault from the outside. Party Chairman William Shearer likens the AIP to a girl "targeted for a rape that didn't come off." By morning all of them--Phillips, Rusher, Viguerie, Morris--have packed their Brooks Brothers suits and disappeared.

Inside the hall, I cruise past the two-man "state caucuses," past the gentleman who hopes to be elected President by convincing representatives of the electoral college to vote for him (as they are constitutionally able to do), past a stars and stripes costume on the body of an elderly woman. She carries flags of the United States and of Texas. Her name is Margaret Mathews and she claims to be the great-granddaughter of Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. We discuss the Civil War at some length. She has two 40-foot flag poles which stand outside her home in Cut-N-Shoot, Texas. On one flies Old Glory; on the other the Confederate flag flying over the emblem of the Lone Start State.

The prospective nominees begin their final pitches forvotes Morris babbles incoherently; Rarick divided the nation into two kinds of people: "Americans and one-world internationalists"; Maddox dismisses those who don't like his image. "The radicals don't, the anarchists don't, the dope-pushers don't, the Communist Russians don't, the agitators don't."

Balloting begins without Alabama--no one from that state has shown up. "Madame Secretary, Nebraska...which commends New Hampshire and its governor Meldrim