Essay: The Demagogue in the Crowd

The audience leaped to embrace the speaker while sitting still. They ate him up. His words were devoured the way seals snap at fish. You could see the words settle in the crowd’s bellies; 25,000 satisfied customers packing New York City’s Madison Square Garden last Monday night to hear Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, bring his dual message of self-help and hate. The message of hate predominated. How the crowd hungered for that meal. At the words of defiance they stood and roared. At the in-jokes they laughed joyfully. At the derisive words they smiled and sneered. The converted attended the preacher.

Why hasn’t the press observed that he reminds them of Jesus, demanded Farrakhan to cheers, applause. “Jesus was hated by the Jews. Farrakhan is hated by the Jews” (more cheers, knowing laughter). “Who were the enemies of Jesus?” (cries of “Jews!”). “The Jewish lobby has a stranglehold on the U.S. Government” (cries of “Yes!,” “Tell ’em, Brother!”). “I am your last chance, Jews.” It will be too late “when God puts you in the oven” (ovation, delight).

And yet: “They call me racist, they call me bigoted, they call me anti- Semitic.” No! You, Brother Farrakhan? What could those reporters be thinking of?

| Still, it wasn’t Farrakhan who got you down Monday night, or the gang of preliminary speakers railing against the Jewish domination of Hollywood and the international Jewish conspiracy. It wasn’t the savage courtesies of the people who checked the audience for weapons; all 25,000 were frisked individually. It wasn’t the uniforms of the Fruit of Islam guards, men in deep blue caps and suits, looking like parodies of club-car porters, or the female guards surrounding Farrakhan as he spoke, wearing white kepis and robes that looked like doormen’s coats. Nothing that occurred on stage was more or less troubling than watching a drunk in a subway cursing the “niggers” or the “spics.”

It was the audience that froze the night, the mostly young, carefully dressed crowd of black men, women and children who had clearly come home to Brother Farrakhan. Discount some of their zeal as a thumb-your-nose-at-Whitey exercise. Discount some as exuberance or hysteria in numbers. Still, the Garden heaved with hatred. If you closed your eyes you could picture all the hate mobs ever–Khomeini’s mob, Kahane’s mob. Their hatred was palpable, enormous. It changed reality. Suddenly the crowd was in the millions, encompassing the living and the dead.

Farrakhan is a demagogue, though not much of one. Compared with North Carolina’s Senator Bob Reynolds, who in 1939 likened the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia to the American pioneer spirit, Farrakhan is rational. Compared with the old antiblack, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish demagogues of the South, like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina, who boasted to the Senate, “We shot the Negroes” and “we are not ashamed of it,” Farrakhan is harmless, at least for the present. He uses the basic demagogue’s tools of swinging illogically from one emotional touchstone to another, of performing little body shivers that tickle his listeners, of sounding threatening one moment, sweet-talking the next and–essential device–of saying “love” as frequently as possible. But he lacks the timing and the verbal gifts of a virtuoso hatemonger. If Monday night’s audience had not already been with him when they entered, Farrakhan could not have won them to his side.

But the crowd were not only predisposed to Farrakhan, they seemed to be ahead of him, rising to his message so eagerly it was hard to tell if the incitement preceded the response. Farrakhan’s male guards, who sat lined up in chairs facing forward on the stage, were trained to leap to attention whenever the audience went wild, as if creating a sudden row of exclamation points. The drill suggested that the audience must have been bursting to express its hatred all along. It seemed so. Farrakhan may be a second-rate demagogue, but he has some first-rate hate to play with.

That hate is directed straight at Jews, not “Zionists” or “Israel” or any other euphemism employed on Monday night. Black anti-Semitism is a special sore spot with Jewish Americans, some of whom gave their lives in the civil rights wars of the 1950s and 1960s. Many more blacks have stood side by side with Jews against bigotry than have stood against them. Yet lately some black ministers and politicians have sounded ambivalent about Farrakhan, praising the self-help program as valuable and treating the bigotry as a minor flaw. Writers such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright have warned that anti-Semitic feelings run deep in black communities, where Jewish shopkeepers and landlords were the only whites within reach and thus came to represent white oppression generally. Being anti-Semitic often seemed a way for blacks to join forces with the white Christian majority, to gain acceptability by turning on another minority.

In spirit, Farrakhan’s followers are already allied with white American anti-Semitism; Farrakhan deliberately appeals to that. Recently Thomas Metzger, a white supremacist and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, contributed $100 to Farrakhan’s cause in a not-so-odd gesture of alliance. Haters know haters. But who make up these seething crowds? What are they like alone with their minds? Their minds were not searched at the doors. Who was that woman with the ecstatic gaze? Your daughter’s teacher?

People wonder why journalists make so much of Farrakhan; this is one reason why. If Farrakhan were a single voice in the wind, little would be risked by letting him bellow without notice. But he has accomplices in tens of thousands of secret haters who are at least as dangerous as their hero because they are anonymous. The press may or may not “create” Farrakhan, but it does not create the silent haters. If everyone turned his face away from Farrakhan or those like him, how would people know the extent of his supporters, or their own peril?

Not that peril was what one really felt last Monday night. No matter how often the hate words spilled, no matter how loud the approval, a sense of reality prevailed: this is an unimpressive man with a relatively small knot of believers. If it is true that from time to time demagogues get too far in the democracy, it is also true that eventually a decent, awakened majority always brings them low. Yet even a limited display of this kind is infuriating and scary. It seizes the imagination and grows immense. After the speech a fifth column of haters walked down the Garden ramps and out into the city, each brooding in his private storm and waiting for a sign. In the morning they mingled with the world.