[Vision2020] Getting Rich Fighting "Hate"

[Tim Lohrmann]

Visionaries,
     This article is on the long side, but
well-written and worth the read. Of course you might
have to save it for later. 
     I knew Dees had been credibly accused of being a
huckster for years. I never realized what a profiteer
he really was.
     TL


> The Church of Morris {Seligman] Dees
> By Ken Silverstein
> Harper's Magazine
> November 2000
> 
> How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from
> intolerance
> 
> Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so
> virtuous? And who could 
> object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the
> Montgomery, Alabama-based 
> group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet
> mildly terrifying appeal 
> to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program,
> which prepares 
> educational kits for schoolteachers?
> 
> Co-founded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum
> direct-marketing millionaire 
> Morris [Seligman] Dees, a leading critic of "hate
> groups" and a man so 
> beatific that he was the subject of  a made-for-TV
> movie, the SPLC spent 
> much of its early years defending prisoners who
> faced the death penalty and 
> suing to desegregate all-white institutions like
> Alabama's highway patrol. 
> That was then.
> 
> Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and
> money--on a relentless 
> fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the
> church of tolerance with 
> all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the
> collection plate. "He's the Jim 
> and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,"
> renowned 
> anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of
> Dees, his former 
> associate, "though I don!t mean to malign Jim and
> Tammy Faye." The Center 
> earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from
> fund-raising and $17 
> million from stocks and other investments--but spent
> only $13 million on 
> civil rights program , making it one of the most
> profitable charities in 
> the country.
> 
> The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis,
> has shrunk from 4 
> million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000
> today, as many as 10 
> percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants.
> But news of a declining 
> Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris
> Dees and Co., which is 
> why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered
> "hate crime" with 
> direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations
> of "armed Klan 
> paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi
> extremists," and why Dees does 
> legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic
> villains-like Idaho's 
> arch-Aryan Richard Butler-eager to show off their
> swastikas for the news 
> cameras.
> 
> In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the
> United Klans of America 
> on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was
> lynched by two Klansmen. The 
> UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose
> sale netted Mrs. Donald 
> $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of
> newspaper stories in the 
> Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9
> million from 
> fund-raising solicitations featuring the case,
> including one containing a 
> photo of Michael Donald's corpse. Horrifying as such
> incidents are, hate 
> groups commit almost no violence. More than 95
> percent of all "hate 
> crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC
> letters cite (bombings, 
> church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated
> by "lone wolves." Even 
> Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most
> extensive investigations in the 
> FBI's history-and one of the most extensive
> direct-mail campaigns in the 
> SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia
> organization.
> 
> No faith healing or infomercial would be complete
> without a moving 
> testimonial. The student from whose tears this white
> schoolteacher learned 
> her lesson is identified only as a child of color.
> "Which race," we are 
> assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the
> specific nature of "the 
> racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his
> schoolyard tormentors. 
> All that matters, in fact, is the race of the
> teacher and those expiating 
> tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth
> of his hurt," she 
> confides. "His tears washed away the film that had
> distorted my white 
> perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her
> eyes, what action does 
> this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like
> disobedience will she 
> undertake in order to "reach real peace in the
> world"? She doesn't say but 
> instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the
> pain." In the age of 
> Oprah and Clinton, empathy--or the confession
> thereof--is an end in itself.
> 
> Any good salesman knows that a products "value" is a
> highly mutable quality 
> with little relation to actual worth, and Morris
> Dees-who made millions 
> hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as
> birthday cakes, 
> cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American
> Home Economics Teachers), 
> tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange
> for a mailing list 
> containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate
> George McGovern-is nothing 
> if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998
> the Direct Marketing 
> Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I
> learned everything I 
> know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees
> has said. "Spending 
> Sundays on those hard benches listening to the
> preacher pitch 
> salvation-why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in
> selling."
> 
> Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author)
> masterfully transforms, with a 
> mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit
> available "at cost" for $30 on 
> the SPLC website into "a $325 value."
> 
> This is one of the only places in this letter where
> specific races are 
> mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters,
> deploying an arsenal of 
> passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized
> the usually divisive 
> issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such
> as angry black 
> people-and for good reason--most SPLC donors are
> white. Thus, instead of 
> concrete civil rights issues like housing
> discrimination and racial 
> profiling, we get "communities seething with racial
> violence."
> 
> Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws,
> or the disparity 
> between poor predominantly black schools and
> affluent white ones, or the 
> violence against illegals along the Mexican border,
> the SPLC gives us 
> "intolerance against those who are different,"
> turning bigotry into a 
> color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring
> to know that 
> "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this
> sin than African 
> Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and
> Hispanics. In the eyes of 
> Morris Dees, we're all sinners, all victims, and all
> potential contributors.
> 
> Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The
> SPLC is already the 
> wealthiest civil rights group in America, though
> this letter quite 
> naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have
> been more flagrantly 
> misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the
> Center had more than $60 
> million in reserves-informed would-be donors that
> the "strain on our 
> current operating budget is the greatest in our
> 25-year history."
> 
> Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10
> million, Dees promised that 
> his organization would quit fund-raising and live
> off interest as soon as 
> its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached
> that figure, the SPLC 
> upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989
> newsletter promised, 
> would allow the Center "to cease the costly and
> often unreliable task of 
> fund raising. " Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges
> with $120 million, and it 
> spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million
> last year-as it does on 
> legal services for victims of civil rights abuses.
> The American Institute 
> of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst
> ratings of any group it 
> monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for
> 4.6 years without 
> making another tax-exempt nickel from its
> investments or raising another 
> tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like
> you."
> 
> The SPLC's "other important work justice" consists
> mainly in spying on 
> private citizens who belong to "hate groups,"
> sharing its files with 
> law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most
> prominent of these groups for 
> crimes committed independently by their members--a
> practice that, however 
> seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians
> pause. The legal 
> strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black
> Panther Party out of 
> business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid
> Company in retaliation 
> for crimes committed by John Brown.
> 
> What the Center's other work for justice does not
> include is anything that 
> might be considered controversial by donors.
> According to Millard Farmer, 
> the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty
> cases for fear that too 
> visible an opposition to capital punishment would
> scare off potential 
> contributors.  In 1986, the Center's entire legal
> staff quit in protest of 
> Dees's refusal to address issues-such as
> homelessness, voter registration, 
> and affirmative action--that they considered far
> more pertinent to poor 
> minorities, if far less marketable to affluent
> benefactors, than fighting 
> the KKK.  Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who
> resigned a few years later, 
> told reporters that the Center's programs were
> calculated to cash in on 
> "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the
> SPLC itself, whose 
> leadership consists almost entirely of white men,
> was in need of an 
> affirmative action policy, Dees replied that
> "probably the most 
> discriminated people in America today are white men
> when it comes to jobs."
> 
> Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be
> surprised to learn how little 
> of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually
> goes to education. In 
> response to lobbying by charities, the American
> Institute of Certified 
> Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits
> to  count part of 
> their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as
> their solicitations 
> contained an informational component. On average,
> the SPLC classifies an 
> estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters
> that it sends out every 
> year as educational, including many that do little
> more than instruct 
> potential donors on the many evils of "militant
> right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues
> of Morris Dees. 
> According to tax documents, of the $10. 8 million in
> educational spending 
> the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to
> solicitations. Another $2.4 
> million paid for stamps.
> 
> In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines
> honing his 
> direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the
> civil rights movement 
> engulfed the South. "Morris and I...shared the
> overriding purpose of making 
> a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a
> lawyer named Millard 
> Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer).
> 
> "We were not particular about how we did it; we just
> wanted to be 
> independently rich." They were so unparticular, in
> fact, that in 1961 they 
> defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist
> covering the Freedom 
> Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I
> felt the anger of a 
> black person for the first time," Dees later wrote
> of the case. "I vowed 
> then and there that nobody would ever again doubt
> where I stood.") In 1965, 
> Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to
> charity, and later started 
> Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate
> appointed with tennis 
> courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded
> the SPLC, where his 
> compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising
> revenues, from nothing 
> in the early seventies to $273,000 last year.
> 
> A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the
> top officers of advocacy 
> groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than
> nearly all of the 
> seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than
> the heads of such groups 
> as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
> Fund, and the 
> Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC
> receives, the less that 
> goes to other civil rights organizations, many of
> which, including the 
> NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy.
> Dees's compensation alone 
> amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the
> Atlanta-based Southern 
> Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen
> death-penalty cases a 
> year.
> 
> "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern
> Center's director, Stephen 
> Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and
> proceeded to list his many 
> reasons for thinking so, which included "your
> failure to respond to the 
> most desperate needs of the poor and powerless
> despite your millions upon 
> millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact
> that you spend so much, 
> accomplish so little, and promote yourself so
> shamelessly." Soon the SPLC 
> will move into a new six-story headquarters in
> downtown Montgomery, just 
> across the street from its current headquarters, a
> building known locally 
> as the Poverty Palace.
> 
>    ________________
> Ken Silverstein is a contributing editor of Harper's
> Magazine and the 
> author of Private Warriors, an investigation of the
> arms trade published 
> last August by Verso.


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