On the second floor of a nondescript manufacturing plant in the midst of a melting-pot business strip in Chicago`s Albany Park neighborhood, an unorthodox political campaign was going on.
Cars drove in and out of the parking lot behind the building at all times of day and night, the clang of a gate on a 10-foot-tall steel fence serving notice to neighbors of each exit from the building at 4507 N. Kedzie Ave., next to the Hispanic-owned tire shop and across from an Egyptian grocer.
Upstairs, at a roundtable of desks, organizers worked the telephones, warning potential voters of the dangers threatening America from drug dealers, bankers and the Queen of England. ”Do you know where your taxes are being spent?” they would demand, sometimes yelling into the phone.
By all accounts, not many Illinois voters were reached by this small-scale campaign by supporters of Lyndon R. LaRouche.
Yet two LaRouche candidates won nomination to statewide office, largely because nobody knew who they were.
”Good Lord, we have a problem here!” Paul Kirk, the Democratic National Committee chairman, told Adlai Stevenson the morning after Tuesday`s Illinois primary, according to a Stevenson aide.
”And it`s not just an Illinois problem,” Kirk told Stevenson. ”It`s a national problem.”
The magnitude of the ”problem” was just beginning to dawn on Kirk and Stevenson and other established political leaders across the nation.
The followers of right-wing extremist LaRouche pulled off a stunning upset: Janice A. Hart, 31, defeated Metropolitan Sanitary District
Commissioner Aurelia Pucinski, slated for secretary of state, and Mark J. Fairchild, 28, had toppled State Sen. George Sangmeister, Stevenson`s choice for lieutenant governor.
Stevenson found himself scrambling for a legal means to push the
”LaRouchies” off the ticket and pondering whether he would have to form a new political party to save his bid for the governorship.
The Illinois Democratic Party had virtually ignored the little-known candidates. It was a mistake.
Neither the Cook County Democratic organization sample ballot nor Mayor Harold Washington`s 600,000-piece mailing included Pucinski or Sangmeister. Newspapers and television largely ignored their campaign, concentrating on more hotly contested races.
Though spokesmen for the LaRouche campaign contend that the primary victory marked the start of ”a transformation in American history,” angry and bewildered voters said they walked into the voting booth and saw names that were completely unknown to them.
The primary, in effect, became a lottery of chance, perhaps decided by voters` attraction to the ”smooth-sounding” names of the LaRouche candidates.
Chance or not, the results have led to a barrage of national media interest in the somewhat shadowy organization that professes faith in LaRouche.
The tales of ”LaRouchies” are near-legend. They have reportedly trained their followers in guerrilla and terrorist tactics. Armed guards surround the reclusive LaRouche`s Virginia estate. Ake Lennart Viktor Gunnarsson, who was briefly held by Swedish officials in the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, was described in news accounts as having ties to LaRouche. Stevenson last week decried LaRouche as a Neo-Nazi.
Yet the followers of LaRouche scoff at such stories, and the Illinois candidates hardly fill the image of surreptitious participants in
international intrigue.
As a University of Illinois student, Fairchild tried out for the position of Chief Illiniwek, the Indian mascot of the school.
”He had real dreams of being Chief Illiniwek . . . but he didn`t get it because he was not a member of the right fraternity,” said his father, James Fairchild.
As a student at Boylan Central Catholic High School in Rockford and the U. of I., Fairchild performed in ”Bye Bye Birdie,” ”Oklahoma!,” ”Fiddler on the Roof” and ”West Side Story.” He also performed at the Clock Tower Inn Dinner Theater in Rockford and around Chicago as part of a troupe called the Hit Paraders.
He was vice president of his Sigma Chi fraternity pledge class and, later, vice president of the fraternity. His fraternity brothers described him as a campus leader who was well-liked, though ”a bit odd.”
”He was always motivating people to get involved in blood drives and other charitable things we did,” said a former frat brother, who requested anonymity.
His parents said they had no idea how the bright young man came to be a disciple of Lyndon LaRouche. ”I am blown away by this; I am taking everything with a grain of salt,” said his mother Anne, who is retired as executive director of the Rock River Valley Council of Girl Scouts.
Hart, a child of New York City`s Bronx borough, had a less idyllic upbringing. Her father, Herman Seidler, a curtain maker, is a Polish Jew whose parents fled the Nazis when he was 1 1/2 years old, Her mother, Maria, was a refugee from Cuba.
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”She was exposed to all kinds of things as a child,” said Max Seidler, 73, Herman`s brother. ”She was let loose on the streets. Her mother was a misfit. She didn`t care very much for what happened to her.”
Max Seidler describes his niece as an emotional captive of LaRouche.
”She`s enthralled by him,” he said. ”He has an ability of speech that enraptures her so much that she doesn`t know what she`s doing. That`s not her philosophy.”
Hart and her husband, Robert Hart, 39, are full-time political organizers for the National Democratic Policy Committee and 12-year veterans of the LaRouche organizing effort. Robert Hart drew 10 percent of the vote in the hotly contested, four-way Democratic primary for Illinois state treasurer, which may have had a roll in the defeat of the slated, Democratic incumbent, James Donnewald.
Compared to the allegations of above-the-law tactics attributed to the LaRouche organization, Fairchild and the Harts have a fairly mild history of civil disobedience.
Hart and a LaRouche colleague, Ronald A. Bettag, 37, were arrested on May 7, 1985, by suburban Glencoe police on a charge of disorderly conduct after they allegedly disrupted a speech by Milwaukee`s Roman Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland at a Glencoe synagogue. Hart allegedly tried to hand the archbishop a foil-wrapped piece of liver.
A spokesman for Hart alleged that Archbishop Weakland was praising Adolf Hitler and that the liver represented the ”pound of flesh extracted by Hitler” during the Holocaust.
Police said Hart and Bettag, a roommate of Fairchild`s, are charged with disorderly conduct and could face fines of up to $500.
Robert Hart was fined in 1980 for ”soliciting business” while standing in the middle of Chicago`s Cumberland Avenue.
The Harts have been involved in political fund raising tactics of LaRouche`s political committee that resulted in civil fines for violating federal law. According to Federal Election Commission records, Robert and Janice Hart were questioned under oath in a probe about money orders from a Chicago bank that were given to LaRouche`s political committee, Citziens for LaRouche, in their names.
The committee agreed in October, 1982, to pay a $15,000 civil fine imposed by the FEC. But the fine was not paid until 1984, when the FEC refused to release nearly $500,000 in federal matching funds for one of LaRouche`s three presidential campaigns unless the overdue fine was paid.
In the glare of publicity, the LaRouche candidates have wavered between the idealistic and the surreal.
They list three planks in the Illinois campaign: the repeal of the Gramm- Rudman federal budget-balancing act; widespread testing for AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome; and an end to what they say is the illegal laundering of drug dealer`s money by banks.
The subjects–the effect of budget cuts on the poor, the epidemic of AIDS, the problem of drugs in American society–are so much on the minds of the public that the ”LaRouchies” would seem to be sitting on the pulse of middle America.
But it is when they describe some of their means for answering those problems that jaws start to drop.
Hart, at a Washington press conference on Friday, bristled at a demand for an explanation of her remarks that ”tanks would rumble down State Street” in the war on drugs.
”Only a poet would understand that,” she said. ”I`m going to use the military with the help of the federal government to wipe out drugs. The use of tanks was symbolic of a declaration of war on drugs.”
Hart later said that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was part of an international ”drug mafia.”
Asked if she believed Jewish persons were behind the drug traffic, she replied: ”That`s totally nonsense. I don`t consider Henry Kissinger a Jew. I consider Henry Kissinger a homosexual.”
At a Chicago press conference, LaRouche spokesman Sheila Jones said the party would use the powers of the Illinois secretary of state to revoke the licenses of banks suspected of laundering drug money, and use the ”eminent domain” authority of the lieutenant governor to order AIDS testing for all state residents. State officials say those offices simply do not have those kinds of powers.
Illinois and Washington officials, in particular Republicans, still scoff at the proposals of the LaRouche candidates. But, clearly, they are taking the group seriously.
A Washington spokesman for the group said 800 LaRouche-backed candidates have filed for primary elections across the country, and they expect the number to double by midsummer. The numbers include 146 U.S. House campaigns, 14 U.S. Senate races and 7 governor elections, plus scores of local elections. The Illinois candidates say that is because they spent less than the $1,000 minimum required for filing, but they did campaign, in their own way. Al Russell, a shipping supervisor for the firm that rents Chicago offices to the group, ventured beyond the locked steel doors of the office to repair their heating system.
”They were all around a circle, nonstop on the telephone, yelling at people,” Russell said. ”They are a little different. We just wanted to be done and get out of there.”
Illinois holds one of the earliest primaries in the nation, and last Tuesday`s experience will serve as a primer for others to follow.
Paul Kirk has told all Democrats to find out who their opponents are. But the ”LaRouchies” say that Democrats do not have to strain to find them. In fact, they are beckoning for the Democratic Party to take a look at their ideals.
”I`ve repeatedly extended a public invitation to Stevenson,” Fairchild said. ”I would like to give him a little time to cool down and back off some of these wild-eyed accusations he`s making.”
Stevenson, and the still-reeling Democratic Party, have not been quick to respond.