Steps In Time Autobiographer
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Much has been written about Southern Poverty Law Center founder Morris Dees over the past four decades. What most people fail to realize is that almost everything written about Dees has been written by Dees and his proxies.
Oddly enough, one of the most interesting and expository pieces ever written about Dees was his 1991 autobiography, “A Season for Justice.” While most people famous enough to warrant an autobiography tend to use them to rewrite unflattering facts about their lives, Mr. Dees described numerous events from his formative early years that explain much about his present worldview.
While Dees and the SPLC have worked diligently to create a polished brand image of a liberal “civil rights” organization, the facts just do not fit the fictitious caricature of either entity.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has followed a coldly calculated path that has done more harm to Liberal causes than any other national organization.
In order to fully understand the rise of the Southern Poverty Law Center and to trace its reactionary ascendance it is necessary to follow the life of its founder, Morris Dees. We will also examine the prolific output of the SPLC’s highly paid public relations department as well as the writings of prominent journalists and reports by charity watchdog groups. Taken as a whole, this documentation leaves little doubt as to the true nature of Morris Dees and his SPLC: to undermine the Progressive liberal agenda at every opportunity.
Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. was born on December 16, 1936, at the depths of the Great Depression, in rural Mount Meigs, Alabama; two powerful sociological influences on any young life, neither of which is conducive to the formation of liberalism. Dees was born into a family of struggling tenant farmers who eked out a living in the cotton trade, hanging on as best they could like so many millions of American families of those times. Liberalism is the product of a full stomach and as Dees admits of his boyhood, “I was much more concerned about making money than I was about making waves.“[i] This conservative outlook would shape Dees’ worldview for the next seven decades.
Dees grew up learning firsthand the value of a hard-earned dollar. He writes that he raised hogs and chickens, delivered newspapers and sold produce to earn money. Realizing that education was the ticket out of poverty and that practicing law was a time-tested route to wealth, Dees enrolled in the University of Alabama in 1955.[ii] The University of Alabama in 1955 was no Berkeley or Columbia University, it was one of the most conservative institutions of higher learning this side of Ole’ Miss and dedicated to “keeping things just as they ought to be.” Liberals did not last long on that campus.
In 1958, Dees’ father introduced him to famed segregationist George Wallace, who was embarking on his first campaign for the governorship of Alabama. Dees writes that he was thoroughly impressed with Wallace and agreed to serve as his Coordinator of Youth Activities during the campaign.[iii] Dees obviously thought enough of Wallace’s racist views that he believed the word should get out to the youth of Alabama… and it did.
Although Wallace lost in 1958, Dees had gotten his first taste of conservative politics and he liked it. He didn’t know it at the time, but within a dozen years Dees would become one of the best friends the Republican National Committee could hope to find.
Intoxicated with his first taste of party politics, Dees made a run of his own for a seat in the Alabama State Assembly. Dees ran on the States’ Rights Democrat ticket, a group Dees admits was pro-segregation and closely aligned with Strom Thurmond’s right-wing, “Segregation Forever!” Dixiecrat movement.[iv] Dees jumped ship at the last minute under outside pressure, only to see the States’ Rights Party swept into power.
Always an astute businessman, Dees found ways to make money even as an undergraduate. Dees and a fellow student, Millard Fuller, came up with an ingenious idea to deliver birthday cakes to their fellow students. Dees mailed out flyers to the families of his classmates, offering to deliver a freshly baked cake to those who could not get home for their birthdays, for a small fee, of course. Dees writes that the business was soon bringing in over a thousand dollars a month, which was a significant sum of money in the 1950s. “But the real bonanza was the education I got in direct mail,” Dees wrote, “I learned to write sales copy, to design an offer, and to mail at the most opportune time.”[v]
It was these skills, the direct mail advertising schemes that would bring Dees more wealth and more power than anything he would learn in law school. Dees mastered the art of the direct appeal, and more importantly, perfect timing. Forty years later, when Dees was inducted into the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame, it would be for his fund-raising prowess rather than his business acumen.[vi]
Dees and Fuller continued the cake business throughout their college years, plowing the profits into local real estate and other lucrative ventures. By the time they had graduated law school in 1960, the two young entrepreneurs sold off their assets, pocketed $35,000 each in proceeds, (about $250,000 in 2009 dollars[vii]), and returned to Montgomery to contemplate their next business venture.[viii]
Dees writes that knowing they could make more money in direct marketing, but still wanting the political power that came with practicing law, the partners decided to pursue both endeavors.[ix] Millard Fuller later wrote, “Morris and I…shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.”[x] Fuller soon realized that “…the high price I paid for my personal affluence was a compromising of my personal morality and integrity.”[xi] Does it seem likely that his long-time partner would remain untouched by the same greed?
The Dees and Fuller law offices opened in 1960, taking whatever cases were deemed too small to bother with by established Montgomery law firms. In the meantime, their mail order business thrived, earning revenues far beyond anything they had amassed while in college. The law office was more of a hobby, according to Dees, just barely making enough money to cover expenses. By 1962, running the office had become more work than it was worth and the partners agreed to shut it down, but not before Morris Dees took on the most controversial case of his entire career.
On May 20, 1961, when a busload of black and white Freedom Riders arrived in Montgomery, they were met with what Time magazine described as “An idiot, club-swinging mob of about 100…“[xii] The idiot leading the mob was one Claude Henley. Though Dees knew that Henley was a member of the local Klan, and even though LIFE magazine had published a series of photos that clearly showed Henley in mid-rampage at the Montgomery bus depot[xiii], when Henley asked Dees for help, “…I didn’t think twice.“[xiv]
Morris Dees agreed to represent Klansman Claude Henley in Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s federal court and he did so without the slightest qualms about Henley’s Klan affiliation or the brutal attack on the young Freedom Riders. Dees writes that he was even willing to defend Henley for the laughable fee of $500 dollars, only jacking it up to $5,000 when Henley let it slip that another lawyer had demanded $15,000 to take the case.[xv] Dees happily defended the brutish Klan thug in federal court. Claude Henley walked away from his crimes scot-free. Henley’s victims received nothing, least of all justice, but Morris Dees cashed the $5,000 dollar check, (worth about $35,000 dollars today), and closed his law office a month later. Dees never even needed the Klan’s dirty money. Millard Fuller writes that the money came from the Montgomery Klan and the local White Citizens’ Council.[xvi]
And now, a brief recap our portrait of the famed “civil rights icon” Morris Dees. Born poor and hungry in rural Alabama, a graduate of one of the most racist, segregationist institutions in the Deep South, an active supporter of George Wallace, and himself a candidate of the racist States’ Rights Party, by the age of 26 Morris Dees had met all of the future SPLC’s own criteria as a bona fide Klan lawyer. Dees was a conservative businessman, who as Millard Fuller points out, “wasn’t particular” about where the money came from, as long as it came.
This is the man who forty years of carefully crafted SPLC press releases would sell to us as a life-long liberal and defender of the poor? It doesn’t add up.
Let us fast-forward to 1971 and the creation of the Southern Poverty Law Center. By 1965, Millard Fuller had grown tired of the demands of the mail order business and sold his half share to Dees in order to spend more time with his family and “to serve God.”[xvii] Fuller would soon give away most of his fortune and later found Habitat for Humanity. Dees sold the entire business in 1969, for $6 million dollars and created the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971, with his new law partner, Joseph Levin.[xviii]
The year 1971 was also a pivotal one in national politics. Richard Nixon was at the height of his presidency and seeking a second term. Ever the paranoid, Nixon conspired with former attorney general John Dean to undertake “Operation Gemstone,” a “blueprint for “dirty tricks” aimed at undermining potential Democratic nominees.”[xix] In such an atmosphere as this, the talents of a power-seeking, conservative opportunist such as Morris Dees would have been incredibly valuable.
Dees writes that in that year he was introduced to Senator George McGovern by Gary Hart, two of the most liberal politicians this side of Hyannis Port. McGovern had heard of Dees’ success in direct mail advertising and asked him to create a fund-raising campaign for his presidential bid. Dees accepted the job, asking nothing more in payment than McGovern’s 700,000-name mailing list.[xx] Against the wishes of the McGovern camp, Dees mailed out a controversial, seven-page solicitation letter, at his own expense. While the letter does bring in contributions from the Liberal hardcore, McGovern went down to one of the most lopsided landslides in American political history.[xxi] Dees walked away with the names of hundreds of thousands of self-described liberals, a veritable gold mine to the King of Direct Mail Fund-raising.
That list was to form the core of the SPLC’s huge donor base. Over the coming years, Dees would repeat his campaign work for Jimmy Carter,[xxii] Edward Kennedy, (after jumping ship on Carter’s re-election campaign after it was clear Carter could never win),[xxiii] and Gary Hart.[xxiv] With the exception of Carter, who narrowly squeaked past hapless, Nixon-tinged Jerry Ford, all of Dees’ ultraliberal clients went down to spectacular defeats in national primaries. For all of his fund-raising prowess, Dees seems to have done little more than to siphon off badly needed campaign funding from more viable Democratic candidates. And we are to believe that this series of costly political errors were nothing more than coincidence? Could the architects of Operation Gemstone have asked for more?
Despite this string of disasters, Dees walked away each time with a newly updated list of liberal donors. Presidential elections come only once in every four years, but Dees made excellent use of the donor lists in the meantime. Dees writes about crafting the very first of a long line of SPLC fund-raising letters, “Before we could ask for money, we had to establish credibility. We needed a prominent figure whose presence would announce the Center’s values and promise. Julian Bond seemed the perfect choice.“[xxv]
As Dees will readily admit, he is a consummate ad man, and this bit of classical celebrity endorsement served the SPLC very well. Although Dees and Bond had never met, Bond was somehow convinced to trade his good name in the Civil Rights movement for what Dees called “the largely honorary presidency” of the SPLC. Dees doesn’t mention any money changing hands, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to assume that Bond did not give the use of his name to an unknown White lawyer from Montgomery, with no civil rights background to speak of, for nothing.[xxvi]
Bond’s name on the fund-raising letters brought in donations far beyond Dees’ expectations. Dees and Levin began the thankless work of representing indigent victims of racial oppression across the South. In its early days, the Southern Poverty Law Center lived up to its name and ideals, but such small pickings were not enough for a man like Dees, who had been on the fringes of the national spotlight. By the early 1980s, the SPLC was experiencing what Dr. Carol Swain described as “mission creep.”[xxvii] Dees began looking for a bigger fish and soon found one with the brutal murder of an innocent black man by two Klan thugs in Mobile, in 1981.
On March 21, 1981, James Knowles and Henry Hays, both members of the United Klans of America, beat 19 year-old Michael Donald to death in retribution for the mistrial verdict that freed another entirely unrelated black man for the killing of a white police officer. Knowles and Hays readily admitted that Donald, who was walking home from the corner store, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After beating Donald to death, the Klansmen hung his body from a nearby tree. Although the wheels of Justice turn slowly in Alabama, Knowles and Hays were convicted of the murder in 1983, with Hays receiving the death penalty and Knowles getting life without parole.[xxviii]
To most people, justice had been served, but Morris Dees saw an enormous opportunity amid the human tragedy. In a stroke of genius, Dees conceived the notion that if a legitimate organization could be held legally responsible for the misdeeds of its employees, why couldn’t the same statutes apply to members of the United Klans, which, after all, was an incorporated entity?[xxix] The strategy was novel in its day and ultimately effective. Dees and the SPLC won a $7 million dollar civil suit against the United Klans on behalf of the victim’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald. It was the kind of publicity that public relations people dream of and Dees made the most of it.
What most people do not realize is what really happened in the United Klans suit and the ultimate meaning of its aftermath. In a 2000 article in Harper’s Magazine, investigative journalist Ken Silverstein revealed the details that the SPLC omits from its public relations copy.[xxx] During the trial, the SPLC sent out tens of thousands of fund-raising letters to its donor base featuring a photo of Michael Donald’s beaten and bloated corpse. The letters stressed the need for immediate financial aid in the upcoming legal battle to avenge Donald’s murder and bring peace to his family.
Whereas the jury in the United Klans trial had every right and need to see the photos of Donald’s body, why would the donors, who had no say in the trial’s outcome? Silverstein reports that the letters brought in $9 million dollars in donations, but why was such funding critical? The SPLC is a law center, after all, and all of its attorneys are already on the payroll. Furthermore, actual court costs in even the most expensive jurisdictions are rarely more than a few thousand dollars. One can imagine what it cost to bring a suit in civil court in 1987 Mobile. Granted, Mobile is a three hour drive from Montgomery, but even the costs of travel and lodging would not have amounted to anything like $9 million dollars.
Obviously, the United Klans of America had nothing like the $7 million in assets required to pay the settlement. What Beulah Mae Donald got in exchange for Dees blatant exploitation of her son’s corpse was the deed to a warehouse valued at $52,000 dollars. Not one additional UKA member went to prison in the case; they merely had to find another place to keep their stuff. Dees got $9 million dollars in cash plus the publicity of “bringing the Klan to its knees,” a catchphrase that turns up in much SPLC fund-raising copy. Dees even reprints the photo of Donald’s body in his book, as well as a photo of himself generously handing Mrs. Donald a check for $52,000 dollars. The check was actually a loan to Mrs. Donald that was repaid to the SPLC after the sale of the warehouse.[xxxi] These are the acts of a liberal “civil rights icon”?
The huge success of the UKA trial determined the goals of the SPLC from that point on. The Center made a point of bringing high profile law suits against Klan groups whenever the opportunity arose. As always, the trials would end in huge settlements for the victims who could only hope to recover the merest fraction from the Klan members. Not one additional Klan member ever went to jail in these cases, for like the ultimate ambulance chasers that they are, the SPLC always steps in after the criminal cases have been settled. Meanwhile, millions of donor dollars roll in to the SPLC coffers as they “bring the Klan to its knees.” Granted, some justice is better than none at all, but the enormous disparity between what the victims get and what the SPLC takes in is incredible.
Like national elections, high profile Klan trials do not occur on a regular basis, so the SPLC must constantly cast a wider net. Moving beyond the Klan in general, the SPLC vowed to “track hate groups” wherever they may hide and expose them to the harsh sunlight of justice. To this end, the SPLC has created a list of assorted “hate groups,” ranging from your traditional KKK and Nazis, to skinheads, White separatists, fundamentalist Christians, “neo-Confederates,” book publishers and the like. The SPLC even reserves a category of “general hate” to describe those “hate groups” that defy other classification.[xxxii]
The beauty of Dees’ “hate group” label is that it is meaningless by design. As there is no legal definition for “hate group” the label means whatever Dees wants it to mean and allows him to smear his perceived enemies without ever accusing them of an actual crime.
The SPLC’s highly paid public relations agent, Mark Potok, admitted as much in USA Today, “The FBI does not monitor groups just because they have hateful ideology. There must be some evidence of criminal wrongdoing.“[xxxiii] Potok’s rendition of the SPLC’s spurious definition of a “hate group” is deliberately vague and open-ended, “…a “hate group” has nothing to do with criminality… [or] potential for violence…It’s all about ideology.”[xxxiv]
And there it is in a nutshell; no legal definition, nothing to do with crime or potential for violence, it’s all about ideology. As the sole arbiter of the appellation, “hate group” means pretty much whatever Morris Dees says it does. Thanks to decades of work by Dees and Potok in crafting the SPLC brand, the media willingly reprint Potok’s press releases as fact and regularly turn to the SPLC as their go-to guys on matters of “hate.” The meaningless “hate group” smear can be found in every major newspaper and on every prominent news program. The architects of Operation Gemstone could only dream of such slavish media compliance.
But what is the ultimate purpose to all of this sound and fury? Everyone is against “hate,” (except the “haters”), right? It all boils down to money. With nearly $190 million dollars on hand in its “Endowment Fund,” the SPLC is one of the most profitable “non-profits” in the country.”[xxxv] In a 2007 article in Harper’s Magazine, Ken Silverstein noted that the SPLC’s “Endowment Fund” exceeded the annual GDP of several sovereign nations.[xxxvi]
The SPLC’s stated goal for the fund was to generate enough income through interest that the Center would no longer need to solicit funds from the public. Silverstein notes that in 1978 Dees said the fund-raising would cease when the “Endowment Fund” hit $55 million; a decade later he bumped it up to $100 million. In 2008, the fund actually broke the $200 million dollar mark, but the fund-raising requests still went out. Annual donations to the SPLC over the past decade have ranged from $30 to $44 million a year, depending on the economy. Some of that money actually goes toward “fighting hate,” but not much.
In 2009, the SPLC took in over $31 million dollars, mostly in small donations by elderly Progressive liberals. Of that total, only $1.1 million went toward “legal case expenses,” which the average person/donor assumes is the SPLC’s raison d’etre. This amount, less than four cents on the dollar, is dwarfed by the $5.7 million the SPLC spent on fund-raising costs and the $12 million it spent on salaries. Another $4 million was skimmed off the top and fed to the bloated “Endowment Fund,” which itself generated over $29 million in interest.[xxxvii] The SPLC took in $31 million in donations and yet the “Endowment Fund” grew by $33 million. Clearly, the donors are not getting a good return on investment.
In the final analysis, this is precisely what the Southern Poverty Law Center was designed to do from its inception. We have clearly seen how Morris Dees’ struggle from poverty, his voracious appetite for money and power, and his self-avowed affinity for the likes of Wallace, Thurmond and Claude Henley make him anything but a liberal. Dees’ SPLC has received nearly a billion dollars in donations since 1971, most of them from working class liberals who might otherwise have donated that money to Progressive political candidates. In politics, money is power, and by diverting this enormous sum from liberals through his SPLC and convincing others to support one un-electable candidate after another, Morris Dees is the ultimate success story of Operation Gemstone.
Can this really be nothing more than mere coincidence? Somewhere Richard Nixon is smiling.
[i] Dees, Morris, A Season for Justice: The life and times of civil rights lawyer Morris Dees, 1991, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. p. 70[ii] Dees, p. 75
[iii] Dees, p. 80
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Dees, p. 79
[vi] DMA Hall of Fame, http://www.the-dma.org/awards/hof/hofinductees.shtml, and http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispannouncements?article=961, viewed June 27, 2010.
[vii] Inflation calculator. http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ viewed June 27, 2010
[viii] Fuller, Millard. (1980). Love in the mortar joints: the story of Habitat for Humanity. Chicago: Association Press., p. 37
[ix] Dees, p. 81
[x] Fuller, p. 41
[xi] Fuller, p. 45
[xii] Trouble in Alabama, Time Magazine, May 26, 1961, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872446,00.html , viewed June 27, 2010
[xiii] “Bloody beatings, burning bus in the South,” LIFE Magazine, May 26, 1961, , pp. 24-25, http://books.google.com/books?id=rk8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PP1#v=twopage&q&f=false viewed June 27, 2010
[xiv] Dees, p. 84
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Fuller, p. 47
[xvii] Fuller, p. 58, Dees, p. 94
[xviii] Dees, p. 102
[xx] Dees, p. 109
[xxv] Dees, p. 132
[xxvi] As a clear sign of just how “honorary” Bond’s title was, he is given two and a half paragraphs in Dees’ 300 page autobiography and is never mentioned again.
[xxvii] Swain, Carol “Mission Creep” August 10, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-m-swain/mission-creep-and-the-sou_b_255029.html viewed June 27, 2010
[xxviii] http://www.southalabama.edu/archives/html/manuscript/donald.htm , viewed June 27, 2010
[xxix] Dees, p. 222
[xxx] Silverstein, Ken, “The Church of Morris Dees,” Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 2000, pp. 54-57, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2000/11/0068709 , viewed July 4, 2010
[xxxi] Dees, p. 331
[xxxii] Hate Map, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map , viewed June 27, 2010
[xxxiii] USA Today, “Mark Potok, civil rights expert.” May 17, 2002, http://www.usatoday.com/community/chat/0517potok.htm , viewed July 4, 2010
[xxxiv] http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=301
[xxxv] Southern Poverty Law Center, “Audited Financial Statement” [2009], http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/resource/SPLCfinancial_2009.pdf , viewed July 4, 2010
[xxxvi] Silverstein, Ken, “Southern Poverty: Richer than Tonga,” Harper’s Magazine, March, 2007, p. 17, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/03/sb-this-week-in-1172847076, viewed July 4, 2010
[xxxvii] Southern Poverty Law Center, “Audited Financial Statement” [2009], p. 14
