Lawrence N. Powell - Troubled Memory

During the Great Depression, Governor Huey Long hired some of the best stone carvers and sculptors around to chisel Louisiana imagery into the state capitol. Looming 450 feet above the Mississippi levee in Baton Rouge, the art deco skyscraper fairly drips with historical references. Massive statues of patriots and pioneers guard the portal to the Great Memorial Hall. Inside dozens of historical scenes fill bronze panels on the monumental doors leading to the House and Senate chambers. High up on the walls a frieze depicts Louisiana in war and peace, including a bas-relief of the Kingfish going over plans with the capitols architects. The most popular visitors sitea plaque located just off the main hall, behind the elevatorswas never part of the original design. Bolted into the Levanto marble wall near three large bullet holes, it marks the spot where Huey and his assassin were gunned down in September 1935.

Traveling exhibits are routinely placed in the Great Memorial Hall, but the forty Holocaust posters ringing the rotunda in early June 1989 set the stage for an improbable clash over the politics of memory. David Duke, the Nazi sympathizer and former Klansman, had just been elected as a Republican to the lower house, and the staff of then governor Charles Buddy Roemer thought it was important to remind Louisianians that the destruction of European Jewry was not a matter for debate. For years Dukes mail-order business had been selling such tracts as The Myth of Six Million, along with an audio recording of himself discussing the so-called holocaust. This stufs so sloppy... the whole thing comes down like a house of cards because its just bullshit, Duke told an interviewer in 1985, and he went on to characterize the Third Reichs most notorious killing center as an Elysian experience: You know, they had a soccer field at Auschwitz. They had an orchestra at Auschwitz, and the band was for the prisoners enjoymentpleasure.