True to the principles enunciated by Margaret Mead, every culture handcuffs hostility within the group. But in exchange for this imprisonment of anger, the culture offers a set of outsiders that it’s acceptable to loathe and sometimes kill. These are the folks we call enemies.
A charismatic leader’s invocation of the enemy’s image is frequently what draws the social organism together.145 Orville Faubus, governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967, knew how to pull together the social beast. He did it by creating an enemy that didn’t exist. In 1957, Faubus was facing an uphill battle for reelection. His popularity was down, for he had upset liberals by allowing utilities and railroads to raise their rates, and had stepped on the toes of conservatives by increasing taxes. But Faubus had an ace up his sleeve—the creation of a bogeyman. Three years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that schools must be integrated. The South was outraged. Numerous Southern politicians were trying to capitalize on the issue, but only Faubus knew how to turn it into a full-scale, headline-grabbing drama with himself at the center.
The governor’s opening move was simple. He phoned the deputy attorney general in Washington to ask what the Federal government planned to do to head off violence when Little Rock’s schools opened their doors in September to both black and white kids. The attorney general’s staff was perplexed. As far as they could tell, Little Rock seemed remarkably peaceful, so the Feds flew an official in to find out what the governor knew that they didn’t. Faubus played it cagey. He had evidence that violence would indeed erupt, he said, but it was “too vague and indefinite” to turn over to anyone else.
“Violence,” said the mayor of Little Rock in astonishment, “there was no indication whatever [of it]. We had no reason to believe there would be violence.” Governor Faubus declared that the mayor was wrong. Little Rock’s stores, he said, were running out of knives, and most of those newly purchased blades were in the pockets of blacks. The FBI checked on Faubus’s claims. In one hundred stores, the sale of guns and knives was actually down. But there were weapons brandished openly in the streets. They belonged to the National Guard troops the governor had called in to “defend” the citizens of his state against the assaults of the supposedly well-armed enemy. When nine black children showed up outside Central High ready to enroll on the first day of school, those guardsmen raised their rifles and turned the kids away. Again, the FBI checked for signs of the budding black insurrection Faubus kept implying was about to begin, clues to the existence of the horde who threatened to slit the throats of innumerable innocent whites. This time, the authorities in Washington issued a five-hundred-page report. They couldn’t find a shred of evidence to prove Faubus right.
The Federal investigators should have checked the home of Orville Faubus’s close friend Jimmy (“the Flash”) Karam. Karam was Arkansas’s state athletic commissioner, a man who could whip together a squad of oversized brutes on a minute’s notice. One day in mid-September, Faubus slipped away to a southern governors’ conference in Sea Island, Georgia, leaving the Flash to carry out a delicate mission. Early in the predawn hours outside of Central High, Karam positioned a squad of thugs recruited from local sports teams. When the first class bell rang at 8:45 A.M., four African-American reporters showed up to cover the black students’ attempts to approach their school. One of Karam’s heavies let out a cry: “Here come the niggers.” The black journalists beat a hasty retreat but not hasty enough. Twenty of the whites planted by the Flash cornered the reporters and started punching hard. As the police moved in, Karam roared, “The niggers started it!” Radio newscasts reported the melee, and, soon, the dregs of white Little Rock, spoiling to defend Caucasian honor, began to pour in. Hundreds of them. When they couldn’t find enough blacks to beat, they turned on northerners. They mercilessly pounded three reporters from Life magazine. The violence that Orville Faubus had predicted for Little Rock had arrived.
Jimmy Karam darted to a gas station phone booth to fill the governor in on the situation. Faubus threw a press conference at the Sea Island governors’ convention and declared soberly that “the trouble in Little Rock vindicates my good judgement.”
President Eisenhower was forced to send in the 327th Battle Group of the 101st Airborne Division to try to restore calm and enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation order. Now Faubus had two enemies threatening his virtuous citizens: the blacks and the Yankee government, the same government that had humiliated the South in the Civil War. Faubus strutted, preened, and protested. He got national network news time on ABC, lambasting the president for having stripped the South of its freedom. He declared that the FBI had taken innocent southern girls into custody, grilling them for hours, and condemned the Federal soldiers for putting “bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls . . . the warm, red blood of patriotic Americans staining the cold, naked, unsheathed knives.” He accused the soldiers of invading the girls’ locker rooms to leer at the helpless young women pinned there by brute force. Investigation showed that the events Faubus described so vividly had never occurred, but at the time that scarcely mattered. In the minds of Arkansas’s white citizens, only one man was standing up to these northern attacks—Governor Orville Faubus.
The result was simple. Faubus had been in danger of losing the election. Instead, he outstripped his closest opponent by nearly five-to-one and won every election after that until he finally retired. By creating an enemy, Faubus had galvanized Arkansas behind him, turning a cloud of disorganized citizens into a social mass.146
Fidel Castro found the existence of enemies equally indispensable, but he had a stroke of luck that Faubus had lacked. His enemy actually existed. The foe Fidel used to achieve social cohesion was the United States, the massive, imperialist monster that over the years, he said, had stripped Cuba of her sovereignty. Fidel needed to distract his constituency from a mind-boggling string of broken campaign promises. In the days before Castro seized power, the bearded leader had stirred up popular support for his revolution by posing as a political moderate, a champion of democracy and of an open society. The guise was a deception. Castro had been studying Lenin, Marx, and the Argentinean despot Juan Peron for years. His real goal was a dictatorship that would put every last scrap of power in his own hands.
Selling the idea of totalitarianism to the Cuban population, however, might have been a difficult proposition. Instead, Fidel played on the island’s dreams of freedom. While still fighting his guerrilla war in the mountains, Castro appointed as president of his provisional government a patriotic, well-meaning, prodemocratic judge from the Cuban city of Santiago named Manuel Urrutia Lleo. Urrutia’s presence gave Fidel’s movement an unmistakably democratic flavor. Fidel went even further. In an interview with Look magazine and an article he penned for Coronetmagazine, Castro declared passionately that his goal for Cuba was the liberty of its people, civil rights, free enterprise, and the privilege of electing officials.147 These statements were a sham. Now that he’d toppled Batista, the leader who had sold his followers on a freely elected government would get away with imposing a despotic political system through the adroit use of an enemy.
This technique was embodied in Castro’s manipulation of an unsuspecting pawn, President Urrutia. When Fidel first came down from the mountains in triumph and took over the reins of authority, he filled his cabinet with figures of indisputably moderate credentials. Then he secretly established a shadow government. In this clandestine group were the “real revolutionaries,” committed Marxist-Leninists like himself, figures determined to implement a program of “social justice” that would entail snatching land from the peasants, establishing state-controlled collective farms, drafting the populace into militias, seizing all businesses (eventually even the hot dog carts owned by scuffling members of the lower class), shutting down the free press, and shifting all control into the hands of a bureaucracy answerable directly to Castro himself. As for elections, they would be totally out of the question.
Gradually, the moderate figurehead President Urrutia began to sense what was going on, and he, like many other Cubans, was not pleased. Urrutia resisted the power grab in the only ways he knew. He refused to attend cabinet meetings when Fidel was present, and made anti-Communist speeches and television statements. He warned the Cuban people that something sinister was taking place. Many Cubans were alarmed, but Fidel stayed firmly on his course of secretly collectivizing society.
Finally, in despair, Urrutia volunteered to go on a leave of absence from his official duties and not return. This, however, would not suit Fidel’s purposes. It could be read too easily by the people as precisely what it was, an act of protest. Castro had a better idea. He persuaded Urrutia to remain in office, then he embarked on a campaign to smear Urrutia’s name. First, Fidel appeared on television, implied that he himself was a staunch anti-Communist, and called Urrutia’s public statements dishonorable. Next Fidel arranged to have hundreds of thousands of Cuban peasants shipped to Havana for a celebration. As the peasants streamed into the Cuban capital, the bearded national savior went on television and delivered a two-hour speech announcing his resignation as prime minister. Who had forced this hero of the people to leave office? President Urrutia. Castro claimed that Urrutia had concocted the phony specter of a Communist menace and used this appalling lie to sabotage the revolution. Urrutia, explained Castro, was an American patsy, paid to spread the poison of Yankee propaganda. His duplicity, said Fidel, moved to the very “brink of treason!”
The mood of the crowds gathered in the streets of Havana grew ugly. They chanted for Urrutia’s resignation. The earnest president who had tried to warn his countrymen signed his resignation while Fidel was still in mid-oration. Then Fidel piled the fantasy of an American-inspired conspiracy to even larger heights. A former Cuban air force commander flew a light plane over Havana dropping anti-Castro leaflets. Fidel’s officials said that the plane had machine-gunned the city. One of Fidel’s top revolutionary fighters resigned his post in disgust over the pro-Communist direction events were taking. Fidel had him arrested and sentenced to a twenty-year prison term. Fidel gathered a crowd of a million Cubans in Havana and announced that these gestures of protest had been part of a massive counterrevolutionary plot engineered by the fiendish Americans. The answer? The creation of massive militias, the restoration of the death penalty, and the reinstatement of “revolutionary tribunals” to ferret out conspirators and send them to a string of concentration camps. The ultimate result of these measures, of course, was to help Fidel banish the old ideal of democracy and to move the country firmly into the grip of the one man capable of “defending” it from its hulking enemy to the north.148
Later, America played into Fidel’s hands by plotting his assassination and launching the pathetically bungled invasion of the Bay of Pigs. These U.S. maneuvers provided the Maximum Leader with an indispensable political tool. If people complained about the food shortages the Castro government had brought, if they were disturbed by the crippling of the sugar industry, or if they noticed the virtual elimination, through incompetence, of the beef industry, Castro could blame the problems on America. As Fidel often confided, there was one extremely useful device for “keeping the spirit of revolution alive.” That tool: an external enemy.149