“I’m James Hart, and I’m running for Congress,” he will tell homemakers, retirees and people home early from work. “I believe white children deserve the same rights as everyone else. If you agree with me, you can vote for me in November.”
Most people will smile politely. Some will nod. Some will shut the door in his face.
For Hart this is personal, an atonement for sins most voters know nothing about.
For the people of western Tennessee, it is about race and old wounds. Hart’s campaign has stirred anger and shame in towns where blacks and whites live apart. It has raised ghosts.
Hart says his only supporter is his 93-year-old mother, Mary. But he did win the primary with 79 percent of the vote. Then there’s the guy who offered to design his Web site. And the 824 who have voted in favor of government-enforced eugenics in his Internet poll.
Hart’s site attracts debate the way a lightning rod draws electricity. But he doesn’t have Internet access at home. He can’t hear the conversation.
What he knows is that Americans are afraid. Afraid of jobs going overseas. Afraid of people coming to take good jobs here.
These old fears still resonate. In Dresden, where the radio station plays Elvis Presley, the shirt and dress factories that once employed hundreds are gone. The book factory that ran three shifts now has about 30 employees.
From all over America, visitors to Hart’s Web site are having their say.
This man is courageous and upholding the ascendant laws of nature written by God himself.
Eugenics should be enforced only to the point of preventing James Hart and people like him.
I am hoping that White people will wake up and vote you into office.
I sincerely encourage you (Mr. Hart) to eat a bullet. For eugenics sake.
Hart won the Republican nomination for the same reason most candidates lose: No one knew who he was.
For the past 16 years, Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District has been represented by a conservative Democrat. Rep. John Tanner is so popular that the Republicans didn’t bother to field a challenger. Hart needed only 25 signatures to get on the ballot.
The district is a rough triangle of land stretching from the edge of Memphis to the western suburbs of Nashville, bending with the banks of the Mississippi and tracing the Kentucky border for 100 miles. In 2002, nearly 168,000 people voted in the congressional race. Hart, who ran as an independent, got about 2.5 percent of the vote.
He admits he’s not really a Republican and the Tennessee GOP wants nothing to do with him.
This spring, Dennis Bertrand, a 53-year-old insurance agent, returned from a stint in Iraq with the National Guard and looked up Hart’s Web site. Too late to make the ballot, he launched a write-in campaign and received less than a quarter of the vote.
In the small towns of the 8th District, race is spoken of in hushed tones. Segregation is over, but blacks and whites inhabit separate worlds. They pray and socialize apart. Even progressives tread gingerly around issues like interracial marriage.
“I would say the change has been pretty slow here,” Bertrand said.
James Hart is 60, a wiry, intense man with spiked silver hair and a sprinter’s metabolism. He campaigns at a brisk walk, cutting across lawns, leaping up steps.
After two decades at Century 21, he can case a neighborhood with a glance. He chooses well-kept single-family subdivisions whose residents are white and comfortably middle class.
Hart doesn’t chat with voters. He doesn’t ring doorbells. He knocks and, if no one answers, leaves a flier wedged against the doorframe. He’s relieved when no one comes to the door.
It’s unpleasant, he says, telling people things they don’t want to hear. That Asians are smarter than Africans. That Detroit is depressed because it’s predominantly black. That immigration and welfare are destroying America’s cities.
"If we had integrated with less “favored races’ centuries ago, there would never have been an automobile,” Hart’s flier says. “There would never have been an electric light. There would never have been an airplane.”
Hart’s racism is only the most accessible part of his platform. Eugenics comes from the Greek word “well-born.” A hundred years ago in America, it was a movement.
Scientists thought they could rid society of poverty and crime by breeding better human beings. More than 60,000 people were forcibly, legally sterilized. The American experiment was a model for Nazi Germany.
Hart wants to give “productive and creative” people economic incentives to reproduce while discouraging the poor from having children.
“I will not win the election, but if I were to win, it would not be because people agree with my ideas,” he said. “They don’t even know what my ideas are. It would be white backlash.”
On Maple Lane, Terry Odle shook Hart’s hand and pledged his vote.
“I like what he stands for,” said Odle, 37, a Dresden alderman. “White folks are getting the shaft here lately. We’re a minority. It’s time to get back on track.”
How does that relate to this discussion? Are you suggesting that Hart’s racial theories are actually correct, and the idea of racial equality is one of those “useful lies”? If not, what are you saying?