Epilogue 171
FOREWORD
Until I undertook to gather all available evidence for what I hoped to
make a definitive inquiry into the circumstances of Huey Long’s
assassination, I had no idea of how many gaps there were in my knowledge
of what took place. Yet except for the actual shooting, which fewer than
a dozen persons were present to see, and for what then took place in the
operating room of Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, most of what had any
bearing on the circumstances took place before my eyes.
Consequently I am so deeply indebted to so many who were good enough to
fill those gaps with eyewitness reports, that no words of mine could
begin to settle the score. Chief among those whose claims on my
gratitude I can never wholly acquit are Dr. Cecil A. Lorio of Baton
Rouge, one of the only two surviving physicians who played any part in
the pre-operative, operative, and post-operative treatment of the dying
Senator; Dr. Chester Williams, the present coroner of East Baton Rouge
parish, who made it possible for me to see, study and understand the
microfilmed hospital chart sketchily covering the thirty hours that
elapsed between the time of the shooting and its fatal termination; Col.
Murphy J. Roden, retired head of the Louisiana State police, who was the
only person to grapple with Dr. Weiss; my friend and for many years
colleague, Charles E. Frampton; Sheriff Elliott Coleman of Tensas
parish; Chief Justice John B. Fournet of the Supreme Court of Louisiana;
and Juvenile Court Judge James O’Connor, who carried the stricken
Kingfish to the hospital after the shooting.
No less am I under obligations to Earle J. Christenberry, Seymour
Weiss, and Richard W. Leche, to whom I owe so much of the information on
background elements that alone make intelligible some of the otherwise
enigmatic phases of what actually occupied no more than a fractional
moment of crisis.
My thanks are likewise tendered to Captain Theophile Landry, formerly an
officer of the state police; to General Louis Guerre who was that
organization’s first commandant; to Adjutant-General Raymond Fleming of
Louisiana; to Charles L. Bennett, managing Editor of the Oklahoma City
_Times_; and particularly to Dr. James D. Rives and Dr. Frank Loria of
New Orleans.
To my one time professional competitor but always close friend,
Congressman F. Edw. Hebert, I tender this inadequate word of
appreciation for the assistance so freely rendered by him in gathering
material. To another friend and colleague, Charles L. Dufour, I am
deeply indebted for assistance in proofreading.
And finally, I am more grateful than I can say to my brother Eberhard,
an unfaltering--and what is more, successful--champion before the courts
of the principle of press freedom, for advice in preparing the final
draft of this manuscript; to LeBaron Barker for invaluable suggestions
in revising the original draft; and to all others who, in ways great and
small, have been of assistance in making possible the completion of this
task.
Hermann B. Deutsch.
Metairie, La.
October 31, 1962
_The Huey Long Murder Case_
1 ---- PRELUDE TO AN INQUEST
“_Assassination has never changed the history of the world._”
----DISRAELI
The motives which prompt a killer to do away with a public figure are
frequently anything but clear. On the other hand, the identity of such
an assassin rarely is in doubt. The assassin himself sees to that, in
obvious eagerness to attain recognition as the central figure of a
world-shaking event.
President McKinley, for example, was shot down in full view of the
throng that moved forward to shake his hand at the Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo. Czolgosz, his anarchist assassin, boasted of his
deed, making no effort to escape. John Wilkes Booth, one cog in a large
plot, did not withdraw in the dimness of the stage box from which he
fired on Lincoln, but leaped into the footlights’ full blaze to posture
and declaim: “_Sic semper tyrannis!_”
In recent times the perpetrator of an unsuccessful attempt at mass
assassination actually clamored for recognition. When the late Cardinal
Mundelein became archbishop of Chicago in 1919, community leaders
tendered him a banquet of welcome. At the very opening of the repast,
during the soup course, the diners became violently ill. By great good
fortune--probably because so much poison had been introduced into the
soup that even the first few spoonfuls caused illness before a fatal
dose could be taken into the system--none of the diners lost his life
as a result of the decision of an assistant cook, Jean Crones, to do
away with the leaders of Catholicism in Chicago.
The cook made good his escape. He has never been apprehended. But for
days he sent a letter each morning to the newspapers and to the police
telling just how he had kneaded arsenic into the dumplings he had been
assigned to prepare for the soup, how he had later bleached his hair
with lime whose fumes almost overcame him, in just which suburbs he had
hidden out on which days, and so on. Short of surrendering to the
police, he did all that lay in his power to identify himself as one who
had attempted a mass murder of unprecedented proportions.
One could go down a long list of political assassinations throughout the
world during the past century, and find that almost without exception
the identity of the extroverted killer was not a matter of the slightest
doubt. No one questions the fact that a Nazi named Planetta murdered
Engelbert Dollfuss in his chancellery, that Gavrilo Prinzip shot the
Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, or that President Castillo Armas
of Guatemala was killed by a Communist among his bodyguards, Romero
Vasquez, who underscored his part of the plot by committing suicide.
In modern history, however, one political assassination is still being
hotly debated, not merely as to the motives which prompted the deed, but
as to the identity of the one whose bullet inflicted the fatal wound.
This was the killing of Huey P. Long, self-proclaimed “Kingfish” of
Louisiana, who was on the very threshold of a bold attempt to extend his
dominion to the limits of the United States via the White House when Dr.
Carl Austin Weiss, Jr., fired on him, and was almost instantly mowed
down by a fusillade from the weapons of the bodyguards with whom Senator
Long surrounded himself wherever he went.
To this day, nearly thirty years after the event, there are those who
believe that the assassination was part of a plot of which President
Franklin Roosevelt had cognizance and in which representatives of his
political organization participated. Only a month prior to his death
Huey Long had charged publicly on the Senate floor that, at a secret
conference in a New Orleans hotel, representatives of “Roosevelt the
Little” had assured the other conferees the President would undoubtedly
“pardon the man who killed Long.”
There are those who accept the coroner’s verdict that the homicidal
bullet was fired by young Dr. Weiss from the eight-dollar Belgian
automatic pistol he had purchased years earlier in France where he was
doing postgraduate work in medicine. According to his father, testifying
at the inquest which followed the deaths of the two principals, Dr.
Weiss carried this pistol in his car at night, ever since intruders had
been found loitering about the Weiss garage.
A great many others--quite possibly a majority of those who express an
opinion on the matter--insist that the bullet of whose effects Long died
was not the one fired by Dr. Weiss, but a ricochet from one of the
bodyguards’ guns in the furious volley that followed.
Still others, and among these are many of the physicians and nurses who
knew Dr. Weiss well, feel certain to this day that he did not fire a
shot at all, that he was not the sort of person who could have brought
himself to take the life of another human being. It is their contention
that Dr. Weiss merely threatened to strike the Kingfish with his
fist--may indeed have done so, since Long did reach the hospital with an
abrasion of the lip after he was rushed from the capitol to Our Lady of
the Lake Sanitarium. After the blow or threat of one the young physician
was immediately gunned down, according to this version of the incident,
a chance shot thus inflicting the wound of which, some thirty hours
later, Senator Long died.
The foregoing contradictory views are still further complicated by the
fact that there are many with whom it is an article of faith that
regardless of who fired the ultimately fatal shot, the leader they
idolized would have been saved but for an emergency operation performed
on him that same night by Dr. Arthur Vidrine.
Finally, there is no agreement to this day on what could have prompted
Dr. Weiss to commit an act which almost everyone who knew him still
regards as utterly foreign to his nature. No valid motive for this deed
has ever been definitively established. One assumption has it that the
doctor was the chosen instrument of the “murder conference” whose
discussions Long made the text of the last speech he delivered on the
Senate floor.
Others feel that inasmuch as Long was on the point of gerrymandering
Mrs. Weiss’s father, Judge Ben Pavy, out of the place on the bench he
had held for seven successive terms, Dr. Weiss’s act was one of
reprisal. At least one connection of the Weiss and Pavy families has
held that Dr. Weiss was actuated purely by a patriotic conviction that
only through the death of Long could his authoritarian regime be
demolished and liberty be restored to Louisiana.
In view of the foregoing, one question poses itself rather relentlessly:
At this late date is an effort to compose such far-ranging differences
of conviction and surmise worth while? Can any purpose beyond a remotely
academic recording of facts be served thereby? Is there anything that
distinguishes in historical significance the assassination of Huey Long
from the public shooting which in time brought about the death of, let
us say, Mayor William Gaynor of New York?
It is because those questions seemed to answer themselves, and
unanimously, in the affirmative that the data chronicled in the
following narrative were gathered. They represent among other items the
statements of every surviving eyewitness to the actual shooting, and of
surviving physicians who were present during, or assisted in, the
emergency operation performed by Dr. Vidrine. They include the never
previously revealed hospital chart of the thirty hours Senator Long was
a patient at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium.
This was no easy search for truth. There are still those who refuse to
discuss the assassination of Huey Long with anyone who does not share to
the fullest their individual views of what took place. None the less,
the significance of two figures--Franklin Roosevelt and Huey Long--so
curiously alike and yet so dissimilar, indicated a genuine need to weigh
every scrap of obtainable evidence and assess any rational conclusions
to be drawn from them.
During the early 1930s no two names were better known in the United
States than those of Roosevelt and Long. The former was the product of a
patrician heritage plus the gloss of Groton and Harvard. The latter had
received no formal education beyond that afforded by the Winnfield high
school. An intermittent career as a book auctioneer, Cottolene salesman,
and door-to-door canvasser in the rural South did nothing to soften the
rough edges of his early environment. No two modes of address could have
differed more radically than the polished modulation of F.D.R.’s
fireside chats and the bucolic idiom of one of Huey Long’s campaign
rodomontades: “Glory be, we brought ’em up to the lick-log that
time”--“He thinks he’s running for the Senate but watch us clean his
plow for him come November”--“Every time I think of how I was suckered
in on that proposition I feel like I’d ought to be bored for the hollow
horn.”
It was once stated that before Seymour Weiss, the New Orleans hotel man
who was perhaps his closest friend, took him in hand, he dressed like a
misprint in a tailored-by-mail catalogue. The description was apt.
Early photographs prove it, if proof be needed. Even when he was
oil-rich from his expanding law practice in Shreveport, he wore a ring
in which a huge diamond gleamed, and a tie-pin in which another, equally
large, was set.
“Stop talkin’ po’-mouth to me, son,” an elderly legislator at Baton
Rouge once advised him. “You got di’monds all over you. Bet you even got
di’mond buttons on yo’ draw’s.”
None the less he was superbly endowed with what, for want of a better
term, might be called personal magnetism, a quality that drew crowds as
sheep are drawn to a salt trough. Nowhere was this manifested more
strikingly than in Washington, where throngs packed the Senate galleries
the moment it was known that he was about to deliver a speech.
He was a superb actor, too. Telling the same anecdote seven or eight
times a day, day after day in campaign after campaign, he would none the
less deliver it with the same chuckling verve at the thousandth
repetition with which he had told it initially. Little bubbles of
laughter escaped him as though involuntarily when he built up to the nub
of a jest. The effect of such tricks of stagecraft was heightened by the
unhurried but uninterrupted flow of words, the affectation of homely
idiom, the Southerner’s easy slurring of consonants.
In Arkansas, at the time of the unparalleled Caraway campaign of 1932,
every gathering set a new attendance record for the time and place. The
address Long delivered from the band shell at Little Rock drew the
largest crowd ever assembled in the history of the state. And when the
motorized campaign party whipped from one city to the next to meet the
demands of a tightly co-ordinated speaking schedule, crowds lined even
the back roads through which the cars passed; crowds of those who,
unable for one reason or another to leave their small farmsteads in that
depression-harried autumn, waited patiently by the dusty roadsides for
a fleeting glimpse of the limousine in which Huey Long whizzed by them.
He was at his best in the rough and tumble of partisan politics, both on
the hustings and on the Senate floor. When Harold Ickes said Huey had
“halitosis of the intellect,” Long retorted by dubbing him “the chinch
bug of Chicago.” To be sure, this was after he had broken with the
Roosevelt administration, when, scoffing at the Civilian Conservation
Corps, he offered to “eat every pine seedling they’ll ever grow in
Louisiana.” At the same time, when arguing fiscal policy with the
Senate’s veteran on such matters, Carter Glass, he said bluntly in the
course of debate that “I happen to know more about branch banking than
the gentleman from Virginia does.”
In these respects, as in matters of politesse, Roosevelt was the very
antithesis of the gentleman from Louisiana. Yet neither would brook
opposition from within his partisans’ ranks. The breach between
Roosevelt and as selfless a supporter as James A. Farley was to all
intents and purposes identical with the disagreements that broke the
ententes between Long and every campaign manager and newspaper publisher
who had ever supported his candidacy. Escaping conviction on impeachment
charges, he announced: “I’ll have to grow me a new crop of legislators
in Louisiana.” When some of Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation was
nullified by the Supreme Court, the President promptly sponsored a bill
to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, with himself to name
at one swoop six additional members; and he did his best to force what
was widely referred to as his “court packing” measure through Congress.
Long campaigned vigorously through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and
other northern Midwest states for Roosevelt in 1932. Some of these
states went Democratic for the first time in more than a generation.
Admittedly this was not all due to Long’s stump speeches. But no one
knew better than Franklin Roosevelt that much of his success in the
Long-toured regions was due to the gentleman from Winnfield. He was one
of the few political leaders who did not underestimate the Long
potential, who correctly evaluated the Long influence in overturning the
politics of Arkansas to make Hattie Caraway the first woman ever elected
to a full term in the United States Senate. He had few illusions, if
any, on the score of the national organization of personal followers
Long was building through his Share-Our-Wealth clubs.
Under the circumstances it was inevitable that these two, neither of
whom would ever admit a potential palace rival into the inner circle of
his aides, should become implacable opponents. Long was on the point of
announcing his candidacy for president against Roosevelt for the 1936
campaign when a bullet cut short his career. The challenge he proposed
to fling at the man who subsequently carried all but two of the Union’s
states was neither a forlorn token like that of Governor Landon, nor a
visionary crusade like the campaign of Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. No
one appraised this more realistically than Roosevelt himself. He never
underestimated the sort of monolithic organization Long could create
around the hard core of existing Share-Our-Wealth clubs, the amount of
whose mail, as delivered to the Senate office building, dwarfed that
delivered to any other member of the Congress.
In pursuance of his objective, Earle Christenberry, with Raymond Daniell
of the New York _Times_, had completed, by midsummer of 1935, the
manuscript of a short book to be signed by Huey Long, under the title of
_My First Days in the White House_. He had written no part of this
rather naïve treatise himself, though he had discussed it in general
terms with those who did draft it. An earlier book “by Huey P.
Long”--_Every Man a King_--was actually a collaboration in which the
prophet of Share-Our-Wealth had dictated sections to the late John
Klorer, then editor of Long’s weekly _American Progress_ (née _Louisiana
Progress_), who later became a successful scenarist in Hollywood. But
the helter-skelter discussions in which Long outlined his ideas for _My
First Days in the White House_ were turned into reasonably coherent
prose by Daniell and Christenberry; much of the manuscript Long never
even saw until it was in final form.
It was an artless bit of oversimplified future history, written in the
past tense to describe the inauguration of President Huey Long, his
appointment of a cabinet (Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alfred
E. Smith were among its members), and the adoption of national
Share-Our-Wealth legislation under the supervision of a committee headed
by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew W. Mellon! But it was gauged for
an audience which already believed that it was possible to redistribute
all large fortunes among the nation’s have-nots. It was never meant to
convert economists, financiers, and magnates. On the contrary, its
principal purpose was to notify all and sundry, especially “all,” that
Huey Long was a candidate for president and was confident of victory.
During that early autumn of 1935 the United States stood at a windy
corner of world history. In Europe totalitarians had taken over Italy’s
tottering liberal monarchy in 1922, and in 1933 the “republic” of
Germany. In Louisiana a home-grown fascist with complete dominance over
his own state was challenging the national leadership. Long had already
put into operation at the local level an authoritarian principle of
governmental sovereignty. Legislative and judicial functions were almost
wholly concentrated in the hands of an executive who was in reality a
“ruler.” The architect of that change was setting himself to expand it
to national dimensions.
The seriousness of this situation was recognized by observers of the
national scene. Raymond Gram Swing listed five public figures in a
volume entitled _Forerunners of American Fascism_ and named Huey Long as
the one of potentially greatest national danger. The others were Fr.
Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, Sr., Theodore G. Bilbo of
Mississippi, and Dr. Townsend. George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor
of the _Saturday Evening Post_, ordered a three-part serial profile of
the senator from Louisiana. Most of this was published posthumously, as
was all of what was to have been Long’s _Mein Kampf_: _My First Days in
the White House_.
_Kingfish_ was thus tapped for a vaulting effort to become America’s
_Duce_ or _Führer_ when violence put an abrupt end to the design and to
the life of its protagonist. Official records in the coroner’s office at
Baton Rouge give no details beyond those embodied on a printed form,
whose blank spaces were filled in to note the name, age, bodily
measurements, color, and sex of the decedent, together with a curt
notation ascribing death to a “gunshot wound (homicidal).”
Nearly thirty years have passed since those notations were entered on an
official form to be filed in the archives of East Baton Rouge parish.
Death has by now claimed many of the witnesses whose testimony might
have been of value in determining what actually took place in the
marble-walled corridor where the Kingfish, hurrying along with
characteristically flapping stride, received his mortal wound. But many
other presential witnesses yet survive.
No inquest worthy of the name has ever been conducted to decide and
record officially what the circumstances of Huey Long’s assassination
were. The family refused to authorize a necropsy. The death of Dr.
Vidrine in 1955 was a portent of the rapid and inevitable approach of
the day when the last eyewitness would have passed on. No one would then
be able to relate at first hand any detail of the violent moment which
averted a conflict pitting the two best-known public figures in the
United States against one another for virtual sovereignty over this
nation.
That violent moment would thus pass into history as a confused welter of
mutually contradictory versions, of rumors, half truths, and whole
untruths. Amid these the Huey Long murder case would remain an unsolved
and probably insoluble mystery. It was for this reason that I undertook
several years ago to gather and collate whatever eyewitness testimony
might still be available. I had known Senator Long and his family for
many years. Of the newsmen who heard Huey Long make his first state-wide
political address at Hot Well on July 4, 1919, I am the only one still
actively reporting the course of events and the doings of public
figures. I had accompanied him not only on any number of his state
campaigns, but also on the remarkable Caraway campaign of 1932.
I knew nearly all of his intimates, and was on first-name terms with
most of them then in the easy camaraderie of journalism. Without
exception every surviving witness I approached has given me his version
of what took place in the capitol corridor at the time of the shooting.
With but one exception every witness who was present in the operating
room and in the sickroom where Huey later died, has told me all that he
saw, heard, or did on that occasion.
These several accounts do not agree at every point. Indeed, here and
there they are rather widely at variance. For that very reason they
merit belief. Such differences validate the integrity of testimony so
given. Had these accounts tallied in every minute particular after the
passage of more than a quarter of a century, or even after the passage
of twenty-five minutes, they would have been suspect, and properly so.
It is axiomatic that eyewitness accounts of the same event invariably
differ, even when given at once. The classic illustration of this is the
prize fight at whose conclusion one judge awards the victory to Boxer A,
the referee calls the combat a draw, and the other judge selects Boxer
B as the winner.
The fact that there is no variance whatever between accounts given by
several witnesses, especially when their testimony concerns an
occurrence involving violence, is as certain an indication of collusive
fraud as is the fact that two signatures, ostensibly penned by the same
individual, show not the slightest difference in form, shading, or pen
pressure at any point. Unless one or both such signatures are forgeries,
absolute identity is a practical impossibility.
The question of whether or not the Kingfish could have wrested political
control of the United States from Franklin Roosevelt became academic
when a bullet found its mark in his body. But a glance at the highlights
of his career offers some of the clues to what happened to him on
September 8, 1935.
2 ---- PROFILE OF A KINGFISH
“_The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity._”
----SIR THOMAS BROWNE
One day some of the VIP’s of the Long political hierarchy were gathered
in the office of Governor Oscar Allen when a matter of legislative
procedure was under discussion. It is worth noting for the record that
the Governor’s chair was occupied by Senator Huey Long. Governor Allen
sat at one side of his desk. The names of the others do not matter.
Among them were highway commissioners, a state purchasing agent, floor
leaders from House and Senate, the head of an upstate levee board, and
the like.
Huey was issuing orders and lost his temper over the apparent
inattention of some conferees, who were conducting a low-voiced
conversation in a corner of the room.
“Shut up, damn it!” he shouted suddenly. “Shut up and listen to me. This
is the Kingfish of the Lodge talking!”
From that day on he was “Kingfish.” Even Franklin Roosevelt, telephoning
him from New York during the hectic maneuvering which preceded that
summer’s Democratic national convention, greeted him with the words:
“Hello, Kingfish!”
The self-proclaimed Kingfish was named Huey Pierce Long at his birth on
August 30, 1893, the third of four sons born to Huey Pierce Long, Sr.,
and Caledonia Tyson Long. The family farm was near Winnfield, and by the
standards of that place and time the Longs were well off; not wealthy,
to be sure, but never in want. Winnfield, seat of Winn parish, is a
small wholly rural community not far from the center of the state.
“Just _near_ the center of the state?” Westbrook Pegler once asked
Senator Long incredulously after watching him put his legislative
trained seals through their paces. “Just _near_ the center of the state?
I’m surprised you haven’t had the legislature declare it to _be_ the
center of the state.”
Scholastically, Huey did not distinguish himself, and he took no part in
athletics, lacking the physical pugnacity that is the heritage of most
young males. His brother Earl, two years younger than Huey, frequently
asserted that “I had to do all Huey’s fighting for him.” But as long as
he remained in high school (he left after a disagreement with the
principal and before graduation) he was the best debater that
institution ever numbered among its pupils.
His first essay into the realm of self-support came at age fourteen,
when he loaded a rented buggy with books and drove about the countryside
selling these at public auction. In doing so he laid the foundation for
what became the largest personal acquaintance any one individual ever
had among the farm folk of Louisiana.
“I’d never stay at a hotel, even later on, when I was out selling
Cottolene or baking powder or lamp chimneys or whatever,” he would
boast. “I always drove out beyond town to a farmhouse where they’d take
me in and put up my horse, and I would pay them something and put in the
evening talking to them, and later I would make it my business to drop
those folks a post card so they’d be sure to remember me.”
At summer’s end he entered Oklahoma University at Norman, hoping to
work his way through law school as weekend drummer for the Kaye Dawson
wholesale grocery. That did not work out. After a heated disagreement
with the head of the business he returned to Louisiana and became a
door-to-door salesman for Cottolene. In glorifying this product he held
cake-baking contests here, there, and yonder.
“My job was to convince those women they could fry chickens, steaks, or
fish in something else besides hog lard, and bake a cake using something
else besides cow butter,” he explained. “I would quote the Bible to them
where it said not to use any part of the flesh of swine, and if I
couldn’t convince them out of the Bible, I would go into the kitchen and
bake a cake for them myself.”
First prize for one of his cake-baking contests in Shreveport was
awarded to pretty Rose McConnell. Not long thereafter, she and Huey were
married. With all his savings and a substantial loan from his older
brother Julius, he managed to finance nearly a year of special study at
Tulane University’s law school in New Orleans. He and Rose shared a room
in a private home not far from the university, where among other
furnishings, a rented typewriter was installed.
Young Mr. Long would bring home a law book, drive through it in furious
haste while his phenomenally retentive memory seized every really
salient detail, “and then I would abstract the hell out of it, dictating
to my wife, who would type it out for me.” With barely enough money for
housing, carfare, short rations, and such essentials as paper and
pencils, it is none the less probable that these were the least
troubled, most nearly contented and carefree days the couple would ever
know. Before year’s end he was admitted to the bar, and returned to
Winnfield with Rose to begin practice.
He soon realized that despite local successes, the ambitious goals he
had set for himself could be attained only in a much larger field. So he
moved to Shreveport, which was just at the threshold of a tremendous
boom following the discovery of oil in the nearby Pine Island areas. By
accepting royalty shares and acreage allotments for legal services in
examining titles and the like, Huey was on the threshold of becoming
very wealthy, when he and the other Pine Islanders discovered that they
could not send their black gold to market unless they sold it at
ruinously low prices to owners of the only available pipeline. Long’s
implacable hostility toward the Standard Oil Company had its inception
then and there.
As first step in a campaign to have pipelines declared common carriers,
he became a candidate for the Railroad (now Public Service) Commission
and was elected. The brothers Long presented a solid front on this
occasion, Julius and Earl working like beavers to help Huey win. George
(“Shan”) had moved to Oklahoma by that time to practice dentistry. Only
once thereafter were they politically united, and that was when Huey ran
for governor in 1928.
Commissioner Long made his first state-wide stump speech the following
year at a rally and picnic which six candidates for governor had been
called to address. He had not been invited to speak, but asked
permission to say a few words--and stole the show!
One must picture him: a young man whose bizarre garb was accented by the
fact that since he was wearing a bow tie, the gleaming stickpin with its
big diamond sparkled from the otherwise bare band of his shirt front.
The unruly forelock of rusty brown hair, a fleshy, cleft chin, and a
general air of earnest fury all radiated anger. His blistering
denunciation of the then governor as a pliant tool of the Standard Oil
Company, and his attack on the state fire marshal, an anti-Long politico
from Winnfield, as “the official barfly of the state of Louisiana”
captured all the next day’s headlines.
Thenceforth the pattern of his future was set. He continued his attacks
on trusts and large corporations, certain that this would enlarge his
image as defender and champion of the downtrodden “pore folks.” His
assaults became so intemperate that in 1921, Governor John M. Parker
filed an affidavit against him with the Baton Rouge district attorney,
and thus brought about his arrest and trial on charges of criminal
libel.
His attorneys were his brother Julius, Judge James G. Palmer of
Shreveport, and Judge Robert R. Reid of Amite. He was found guilty, but
his reputation as a pitiless opponent was already so great that only a
token sentence was imposed: one hour’s detention, which he served in the
Judge’s chambers, and a one-dollar fine. He was so delighted by the
outcome that he gave his youngest son, born that day, the names of his
attorneys: Palmer Reid Long. Also, some years later, he saw to it that
the judge who had imposed the token penalties was elected to the state
supreme court.
Continuing his onslaughts against millionaires and monopolies, he ran
for governor in 1924 on a platform of taxing the owners of great
fortunes to aid the underprivileged in their struggle for a reasonable
share of the better life: education for their children, medical care for
all who could not afford to pay, and some sort of economic security for
all who toiled, be it in factory, market place, mine, or farm.
He now inveighed against Wall Street as a whole, not merely against
isolated corporations as before. The Mellon fortune and the House of
Morgan came in for their oratorical lumps; but it is a matter of record
that later, when Earl and Huey had fallen out, the former testified
under oath before a Senate investigating committee that he had seen his
brother accept $10,000 from an official of the Electric Bond and Share
Company “in bills so new they looked like they’d just come off the
press.”
However, from every stump Huey proclaimed that “ninety per cent of this
nation’s wealth is in the hands of ten per cent of its people.... The
Bible tells us that unless we redistribute the wealth of a country
amongst all of the people every so often, that country’s going to smash;
but we got too many folks running things in Louisiana and in Washington
that think they’re smarter than the Bible.”
None the less he ran third in a three-man first primary. In view of the
fact that he had no organized backing it must be conceded that it was a
close third, an amazing achievement the credit for which must be given
to his wide acquaintance among the farm population and the matchless
fire of his eloquence. A number of factors contributed to his defeat.
One of them undeniably was his refusal, or inability, to recognize that
he “could not hold his liquor.” After a convivial evening at a
lake-front resort in New Orleans, he drove back to town with his
campaign manager at a wildly illicit speed and was promptly halted by a
motorcycle officer. His campaign manager hastily explained to the
patrolman that the car was his, and that his chauffeur, one Harold Swan,
had merely acted under orders. But the fact that Huey Long and Harold
Swan in this instance were one and the same came out later, along with
accounts of how Huey had gone tipsily from table to table at the Moulin
Rouge inviting all and sundry to be his personal guests at his inaugural
ball.
Ordinarily, this might have won him votes in tolerant south Louisiana,
where prohibition was regarded as the figment of sick imaginations, like
the _loup garou_. But in south Louisiana he had few backers in that
campaign to begin with, being a north Louisiana hillman; and in north
Louisiana, where drinking had to be done in secret even before the
Volstead Act became nominally the law of the land, such reports were
sheer poison.
Finally, the weather on election day turned foul. The wretched dirt
roads of the hinterlands where Huey’s voting strength was concentrated
became impassable, so that many of his supporters could not reach their
polling places. But four years later, when he once more ran for governor
in yet another three-man race, he barely missed a majority in the first
primary. No run-off was held, however, because one of his opponents
announced he would throw his support to Long, pulling with him many
followers, including a young St. Landry parish physician, Dr. F. Octave
Pavy, who had run for lieutenant governor. Under the circumstances a
second primary would have been merely an empty gesture of defiance.
As governor, he rode roughshod over all opposition to his proposal to
furnish free textbooks to every school child, not merely in the public
schools, but in the Catholic parochial schools and the posh private
academies as well; for a highway-improvement program which he proposed
to finance out of increased gasoline taxes. Nor was he one to hide his
light under a bushel in pretended modesty. On the contrary, after each
success he rang the changes on Jack Horner’s classic “What a good [in
the sense of great] boy am I.” Moreover, it made little difference to
his devotees whether his promises of still greater benefits for the
future, or boasts about the wonders he had already achieved, were based
on fact or fiction.
By way of illustration: Dr. Arthur Vidrine, a back-country physician,
was catapulted into the superintendency of the state’s huge Charity
Hospital at New Orleans, and later was additionally made dean of the new
state university College of Medicine Long decided to found. Vidrine had
won the new governor’s warm regard by captaining the Long cause in Ville
Platte, where he was a general practitioner.
In some quarters there is a disposition to regard Arthur Vidrine as no
more than a hack who relied on political manipulation to secure
professional advancement. While it is obvious that his original support
of, and later complete subservience to, Huey Long brought him
extraordinary preferment, it must not be overlooked that in 1920, when
he was graduated from Tulane University’s college of medicine, he was a
sufficiently brilliant student to be chosen in open, nonpolitical
competition for the award of a Rhodes scholarship, and that for two
years he took advantage of this grant to pursue his studies abroad.
After his return he served for a time as junior intern at New Orleans’
huge Charity Hospital ... and within four years he was made
superintendent of that famous institution and dean of his state
university’s new medical school, both appointments being conferred on
him by newly elected Governor Huey Long, who lost no opportunity to
picture his protégé as something of a miracle man in the realm of
healing.
To an early joint session of the legislature, His Excellency announced
that under his administration Dr. Vidrine had reduced cancer mortality
at Charity Hospital by one third. This was obvious nonsense. Had it not
been, the medical world would long since have beaten a path to the
ornamental iron gates of the century-old hospital in quest of further
enlightenment.
One of the newspapers finally solved the mystery of this miracle of
healing. It stemmed solely from a change in the system of tabulating
mortality statistics. Calculated on the old basis, the death rate was
precisely what it had been before, a little better in some years, a
little worse in others. All this was set forth publicly in clear, simple
wording. But except for a few of the palace guard, who cynically
shrugged the explanation aside, not one of the Long followers accorded
it the slightest heed. They and their peerless standard bearer continued
to glory in the “fact” that he had reduced Charity’s cancer death rate
by a third.
This accomplishment was by no means the only one of which young
Governor Long boasted. Less tactfully, and certainly less judiciously,
he made vainglorious public statements to the effect that “I hold all
fifty-two cards at Baton Rouge, and shuffle and deal them as I please”;
also that he had bought this legislator or that, “like you’d buy a sack
of potatoes to be delivered at your gate.”
Within a year the House of Representatives impeached him on nine counts.
Huey had learned that such a movement was to be launched at a special
session in late March of 1929, and sent word to his legislative legions
to adjourn _sine die_ before an impeachment resolution could be
introduced. But an electric malfunction in the voting machine made it
appear that the House voted almost unanimously to adjourn, when in fact
opinion was sharply divided. A riot ensued, which was finally quelled
when Representative Mason Spencer of Tallulah, a brawny giant, bellowed
the words: “In the name of sanity and common sense!” Momentarily this
stilled the tumult and Spencer, not an official of the House, but merely
one of its members, called the roll himself, by voice, on which tally
only seven of the hundred members voted to adjourn.
The committee of impeachment managers in the House was headed by Spencer
and by his close friend, another huge man, George Perrault of Opelousas.
However, the impeachment charges were aborted in the Senate, when Long
induced fifteen members of that thirty-nine-man body to sign a round
robin to the effect that on technical grounds they would refuse to
convict regardless of evidence. Since this was one vote more than enough
to block the two-thirds majority needed for conviction, the impeachment
charges were dropped.
Spencer and Perrault remained inseparable friends, occupying adjacent
seats in the House to the day of Perrault’s death during the winter of
1934. On the night of September 8, 1935, Huey stopped to chat
momentarily with Spencer, who took occasion to protest against the
appointment of Edward Loeb, who had replaced his friend Perrault
“All these years I’ve got used to having a man the size of George
Perrault sitting next to me,” he complained. “Did you have to make Oscar
appoint a pint-size member like Eddie Loeb to sit in his place here?”
“You remind me,” retorted Long, “of the old nigger woman that was in a
bind of some sort, and her boss helped her out, giving her clothes or
money or vittles or whatever. So she said to him: ‘Mist’ Pete, you got a
white face, fo’ true, but you’s so good you’s bound to have a black
heart.’ That’s you, Mason. Your face is white, but you’ve sure enough
got a black heart.”
* * * * *
A year after the abortive impeachment Long announced he would run for
the Senate forthwith, though his gubernatorial tenure would not be
terminated for another two years. In this way, he said, he would submit
his case to the people. If they elected him, they would thereby express
approval of his program. If not, they would elect his opponent, the
long-time incumbent senator. Long was elected overwhelmingly, and then
went from one political success to another, electing another
Winnfieldian, his boyhood chum Oscar Allen, to succeed him as governor,
and smashingly defeating a ticket on which his brother Earl was running
for lieutenant governor with his brother Julius’ active support. It was
later that year that Earl testified against Huey before a Senate
committee.
In that same year Huey Long entered Arkansas politics. Mrs. Hattie
Caraway, widow of Senator Thad Caraway, had been appointed to serve the
few remaining months of her husband’s term, then announced as a
candidate for re-election. Huey had two reasons for espousing her
candidacy. First, she had voted with him for a resolution favoring the
limitation of individual incomes by law to a maximum of a million
dollars a year. Secondly, the senior senator from Arkansas, Majority
Leader Joe T. Robinson, who had turned thumbs down on this resolution,
had endorsed one of the candidates opposing Mrs. Caraway’s election.
Thirdly, he felt it was time to put the country on notice that
Kingfishing could be carried successfully beyond the borders of its home
state.
Mrs. Caraway was accorded no chance to win. Every organized political
group in the state had endorsed one or another of her six opponents,
among whom were included a national commander of the American Legion,
two former governors, a Supreme Court justice, and other bigwigs. The
opening address of the nine-day campaign Huey Long waged with Mrs.
Caraway was delivered at Magnolia, just north of the Louisiana border.
At its close, a dazed local political Pooh-Bah wired a major campaign
headquarters in Little Rock: “A tornado just passed through here. Very
few trees left standing, and even those are badly scarred up.”
It was here that Long first formulated what later became the
Share-Our-Wealth clubs’ credo.
“In this country,” he proclaimed, “we raise so much food there’d be
plenty for all if we never slaughtered another hog or harvested another
bushel of grain for the next two years, and yet people are going hungry.
We’ve got enough material for clothes if in the next two years we never
tanned another hide or raised another lock of cotton, and yet people are
going barefoot and naked. Enough houses in this land are standing empty
to put a roof over every head at night, and yet people are wandering the
highways for lack of shelter.”
The remedy he proposed was simple: share our wealth instead of leaving
almost all of it in the hands of a greedy few.
“All in this living world you’ve got to do,” he insisted, “is to limit
individual incomes to one million dollars a year, and fix it so nobody
when he dies can leave to any one child more than five million dollars.
And let me tell you something: holding one of those birds down to a
measly million dollars a year’s no sort of hardship on him. At that rate
of income, if he stopped to bathe and shave, he’d be just about five
hundred dollars the richer by the time he got his clothes back on.
“What we got to do is break up those enormous fortunes like the
billion-dollar Mellon estate. By allowing them a million dollars a year
for spending-money you’ll agree we wouldn’t be hurting ’em any to speak
of. We’d have the balance to distribute amongst all the people, and that
would fix things so everybody’d be able to live like he could right now
if he made five thousand a year. Yes sir, like he was having five
thousand a year and a team of mules to work with, once we share the
wealth!”
Today it is almost impossible to visualize the effect of so alluring a
prospect on a countryside forced at that time to rely on the Red Cross
for seed corn and sweet-potato slips to assure a winter’s food supply.
The rural Negroes in particular, their “furnish” sadly shrunken as a
result of the depression, accepted it almost as gospel that Huey Long
was promising them five thousand dollars a year and a team of mules.
The impact of Long’s oratory was so clearly obvious that a special
committee waited on him at Texarkana, where he planned to close the
campaign on Saturday night, to ask that he remain in Arkansas over the
weekend to address meetings in the tier of counties along the
Mississippi River on Monday, the day before the election. He agreed to
do this, canceled plans to drive to Shreveport from Texarkana, and drove
back to Little Rock instead. Since this left the accompanying newsmen
with no grist for the early Monday editions, and since he had been
quoting the Bible right and left in his speeches, not to mention the
fact that in the glove compartment of his Cadillac a well-thumbed Bible
reposed beside a loaded revolver and an atomizer of throat spray, he was
asked where he expected to attend church the next morning.
“Me go to church?” he inquired incredulously. “Why I haven’t been to a
church in so many years I don’t know when.”
“But you’re always quoting the Bible and so....”
“Bible’s the greatest book ever written,” he interrupted, “but I sure
don’t need anybody I can buy for six bits and a chew of tobacco to
explain it to me. When I need preachers I buy ’em cheap.”
Mrs. Caraway’s first primary victory was a landslide. Well pleased, Huey
returned to Louisiana to defeat two-term incumbent Senator Edwin S.
Broussard and elect one of his chief attorneys in the impeachment case,
John H. Overton, in his stead. It was this election which a Senate
committee later investigated to sift allegations of fraud. The
investigation was recessed midway to give Senator Long an opportunity to
halt a threatened bank run by the simple expedient of having Oscar Allen
proclaim Saturday, February 4, a holiday celebrating the fact that
sixteen years before, on February 3 and 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson had
severed diplomatic relations with Germany!
PROCLAMATION
STATE OF LOUISIANA
EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT
BATON ROUGE
Whereas, on the nights of February 3 and 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson,
president of the United States, severed diplomatic relations with the
Imperial German government; and
Whereas, more than 16 years has intervened before the great American
people have turned their eyes back to the lofty ideals of human uplift
and new freedom as propounded by Woodrow Wilson; and
Whereas, it is now fitting that due recognition be given by the great
State of Louisiana in line with the far-reaching principles enunciated
by the illustrious southerner who sought to break the fetters of
mankind throughout the world;
Now, therefore, I, Oscar Kelly Allen, governor of the State of
Louisiana, do hereby ordain that Saturday, the fourth day of February,
1933, the 16th anniversary of the severance of diplomatic relations
between the United States and the Imperial German government be, and
the same is hereby declared, a holiday throughout the State of
Louisiana and I do hereby order that all public business, including
schools, colleges, banks and other public enterprises be suspended on
said day and that the proper ceremonies to commemorate that event be
held.
In witness whereof I have caused to be affixed the great seal of the
State of Louisiana on this, the third day of February, in the year of
Our Lord, A. D. 1933.
[Illustration: Oscar Kelly Allen
Governor]
[Illustration: Attest:
E. A. Conway
Secretary of State.]
This meant that all public offices, schools--and banks--were legally
forbidden to open their doors on that Saturday; by Sunday the Federal
Reserve authorities had put $20,000,000 at the disposal of the menaced
bank and the run which might have spread panic throughout the country
died a-borning. However, bank closures on a national scale were thus
postponed for only a month. March 4, while Franklin Roosevelt was taking
his first oath as president, state after state was ordering its banks to
close, as financial consternation (vectored from Detroit, however, and
not from New Orleans) stampeded across the land.
One of the newly inaugurated President’s first acts--“The only thing we
have to fear is fear itself!”--was to order all the nation’s banks to
close until individually authorized by executive permit to reopen. But
the onus of having initiated the disaster had been averted from
Louisiana by Huey’s bizarre bank holiday, and this underscored the fact
that for some time past, the number and ratio of bank failures in
Louisiana had been far, far below the national average. It also
strengthened the growing conviction that Louisiana’s Long was something
more than another Southern demagogue like Mississippi’s Bilbo or Texas’
Pa Ferguson.
Franklin Roosevelt was probably never under any illusions on that score.
He gauged quite correctly the omen of Share-Our-Wealth’s growing
strength. It had been blueprinted for all to see when Mrs. Caraway’s
candidacy swept the boards in Arkansas, and again when this movement,
plus the oratorical spell cast by the Louisianian in stumping the
Midwestern prairie states, carried them for Roosevelt later that same
autumn. According to Long’s subsequent diatribes, he had campaigned thus
for “Roosevelt the Little” on the express understanding that the
president-to-be would back the program for limiting individual incomes
and bequests by statute.
There is ample ground for the belief that Long was secretly gratified
when he realized that the New Dealers would have none of this proposal.
The issue which had served him so well in the past could thus be turned
against Roosevelt four years later, when Long planned to enter the lists
as a rival candidate for the world’s loftiest office. Publicly, to be
sure, he professed himself outraged by “this double cross,” bolted the
administration ranks once more, repeated an earlier, defiant fulmination
to the effect that if the New Dealers wished to withhold control over
Louisiana’s federal appointments from him, they could take this
patronage and “go slap dab to hell with it.”
Roosevelt and his _fidus Achates_, Harry Hopkins, took him at his word,
and gave the anti-Long faction, headed by Mayor Walmsley of New Orleans,
a controlling voice in the distribution of federal patronage. The
breach between the two standard bearers--one heading the New Deal and
a federal bureaucracy tremendously swollen by a swarm of new
alphabetical agencies, the other all but worshiped as archangel of
Share-Our-Wealth--widened from month to month.
Roosevelt left the anti-Long philippics to members of his cabinet and
other department heads: Hugh Johnson, NRA administrator, for example, or
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. The climax to these interchanges came
in the late summer of 1935, when in an address delivered on the Senate
floor, Long charged that “Franklin Delano Roosevelt the first, the last,
and the littlest” was linked to a plot against his--Huey Long’s--life.
3 ---- AUGUST 8, 1935: WASHINGTON
“_I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone
who killed Long._”
----UNIDENTIFIED VOICE FROM A DICTOGRAPH RECORD QUOTED BY HUEY LONG IN
AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNITED STATES SENATE
Long’s charge that he had been selected for assassination by a cabal in
whose plot President Roosevelt was involved at least by implication made
headlines from coast to coast and filled page on page of the
_Congressional Record_. But it fell quite flat, being taken in a
Pickwickian rather than in any literal sense. Even the unthinking elders
of the Share-Our-Wealth clubs, their numbers now sadly shrunken by
reason of the march of time, still cling to a rather pathetic belief in
this extravagant bombast only by reason of an uncanny and unrelated
coincidence: within less than thirty days after making the charge Long
actually was assassinated.
His climactic thrust at the White House was not taken too seriously at
the time, however, because, for one thing, Long had cried “plot against
me” too often. By the fall of 1935 the story was old hat, even though it
had never before been blazoned in so august a tribunal as the Senate,
and had never before involved, even by indirection, a chief executive.
On two previous occasions he had placed Baton Rouge under martial law,
calling out the militia, to defend him against plots on his life. Only
seven months before making the Senate speech in question he had
“exposed” the plot of a group of Baton Rouge citizens, a number of high
officials among them, to waylay his automobile on a given night while he
was being driven to New Orleans, and kill him at a lonely bend of the
River Road where the car would of necessity have to slow down.
In proof of this he put on the witness stand an informer who had
infiltrated into the ranks of the supposedly plotting group, and who
testified as to the details of a conspiracy.
Early in his senatorial career he had made himself so offensive in the
washroom of a club at Sands Point, Long Island, that the irate victim of
a demand to “make way for the Kingfish” slugged him. Since the blow
split the skin over an eyebrow, the incident could not be concealed.
Long promptly charged that hired bravos of the House of Morgan had
assaulted him in the club washroom, intent on taking his life.
Finally, when what he told the Senate on that August day in 1935 was
boiled down in its own juices it made pretty thin gruel, as anyone who
cares to wade through the fine print of the _Congressional Record_ for
that date can see for himself. The truth is that on the eve of Congress’
adjournment, Long was trying to build up against Roosevelt something he
could tub-thump before the voters in the next year’s presidential
campaign.
On the principle that “the best defense is an attack,” he was keeping
the New Deal hierarchy in Washington so busily occupied on another front
that he could take advantage of their preoccupation to infiltrate
Louisiana’s federal patronage with his followers.
Presumably control over these appointments to all sorts of oddball
positions under the PWA, WPA, and other auspices was now in the hands
of the anti-Long contingent, headed by among others a good half of the
state’s members in the lower house of Congress. But these were parochial
politicians, fumblingly inept at organizing such matters on a state-wide
scale. To cite but a single example, one project sponsored under the
anti-Long dispensation was a review of the newspaper files in the New
Orleans City Hall archives. By direction of Mayor Walmsley, so many
appointees were packed into this particular task that they had to work
in one-hour-a-day shifts in order to find physical room in the small
garret-like space set aside for it.
Theoretically, they were to index these files, and to repair torn pages
with gummed tape as they came across them. Actually, they would for the
most part merely turn the leaves of the clumsy bound volumes until they
came to the Sunday comics or other such features, and read these at
leisure. Then they repaired to Lafayette Square when their hour of
demanded presence was up, and joked about the way they would put out of
joint the noses of the anti-Long leadership on election day; for of
course most of them were dedicated Share-Our-Wealthers eagerly looking
forward to $5000-a-year incomes when Huey Long got around to
redistributing the nation’s wealth.
Meanwhile their Kingfish was giving the anti-Long leaders a real
Roland--an entire battalion of Rolands, in fact--for their patronage
Oliver. The spoils-system theory of a patronage plum is that its
bestowal is good for three votes; in other words, that the recipient and
at least two members of his family or circle of friends will vote for
the party favored by the job’s bestower. A United States senator would
normally be consulted about appointments to all federal patronage posts
not covered by civil service in his state: Collector of the Port,
Surveyor of the Port, Collector of Internal Revenue, district attorneys,
federal judges, and the like. During the early New Deal era this roster
was tremendously amplified by the staffs of numerous new alphabetical
agencies and their labor force.
Huey Long may not have expected to be taken quite so literally when he
told the Roosevelt hierarchs they could take their patronage “slap-dab
to hell” as far as he was concerned. But when he saw that he was indeed
given no voice in any Louisiana federal appointment, he initiated an
entire series of special sessions of the state legislature which
subserviently enacted a succession of so-called “dictatorship laws.”
Under these statutes he took the control of every parochial and
municipal position in every city, village, and parish out of the hands
of the local authorities, and vested the appointive power in himself.
He did this by creating new state boards, composed of officials of his
own selection, without whose certification no local public employee
could receive or hold any post on the public payroll. A board of teacher
certification was thus set up and without its--which is to say, Huey
Long’s--approval, no teacher, janitor, school-bus driver, or principal
could be employed by any local parish or city school board. No municipal
police officer or deputy sheriff throughout the state, no deputy clerk
or stenographer in any courthouse, no city or parish sanitary inspector,
and so on down the entire line of public payroll places, could continue
in his or her position unless specifically okayed by Senator Long. In
those pre-civil-service days the appointive state, parish, and city
employees in Louisiana outnumbered the federal patronage places within
the state by hundreds to one, even during the New Deal’s era of
production controls and “recovery.”
Hence, for each federal patronage job he had nominally lost to his
opponents he gained hundreds--literally--of local appointments which
were thenceforth at his disposal. When this was pointed out in the
anti-Long press and he was asked for comment, he chuckled and said:
“I’m always ready to give anybody a biscuit for a barrel of flour.”
In sum, he had brought practically all local public employees, including
those who staffed Mayor Walmsley’s city administration in New Orleans,
under the Long banner by the summer of 1935. Only a scant handful of
“dictatorship laws” yet remained to be enacted, and these were already
being drafted to his specifications. The moment Congress adjourned, when
he would be released from Washington and could return to Louisiana, they
would be rushed to enactment.
Meanwhile he readied his parting shot against the White House. The
incident on which he based the grotesque charge that President Roosevelt
abetted, or at the very least knew of and acquiesced in, an
assassination plot was a supposedly _sub rosa_ political caucus held at
the Hotel De Soto in New Orleans on Sunday, July 21, 1935. The gathering
had been convened presumably without letting any outsider (i.e.,
“nonplotter”) know it was to be held. Its ostensible objective was the
selection of an anti-Long gubernatorial candidate whom all anti-Long
factions would agree to support against any nominee the Senator might
hand-pick for endorsement.
However, with what still appears to be a positive genius for fumbling,
the anti-Long leadership guarded with such butter-fingered zeal the
secret of whether, where, or when they were to meet that even before
they assembled, Long aides had ample time to install the microphone of a
dictograph in the room where the anti-Long General Staff was to confer.
The device functioned very fuzzily. Its recording (which it was hoped to
duplicate and replay from sound trucks throughout the ensuing campaign)
was only spottily intelligible. But a couple of court reporters had also
been equipped with earphones at a listening post, and their stenographic
transcript, though incomplete, afforded some excerpts which Senator
Long inflated into what he presented as a full-scale murder plot.
His fulmination was delivered before a crowded gallery, as usual. This
popularity annoyed many of his senior colleagues, none more so than
Vice-President Garner, whom John L. Lewis was soon to stigmatize as
“that labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man.” More
than once, as the galleries emptied with a rush the moment Long
finished, Mr. Garner would call to the departing auditors, saying: “Yes,
you can go now! The show’s over!”
In this instance, as on many previous occasions, there was no advance
hint of the fireworks to come. The fuse was a debate over the
Frazier-Lemke bill, and Senator Long contented himself at the outset
with charging that the administration was conducting “government by
blackmail.” In making this statement he was referring to NIRA, which had
succeeded NRA, the latter having been declared unconstitutional some
three months earlier. This had nothing to do with the Frazier-Lemke
bill, but it gave Mr. Long an opportunity to charge that no contracts
for PWA work were being financed unless the contractor agreed to abide
by all the provisions of the NRA code which the Supreme Court had
invalidated.
That led to the statement that “we in Louisiana have never stood for
[such] blackmail from anybody,” which in turn led to a section of his
arraignment the _Congressional Record_ headed:
“THE PLAN OF ROBBERY, MURDER,
BLACKMAIL, OR THEFT”
He then loosed his farewell salvo.
“I have a record of an anti-Long conference held by the anti-Long
Representatives from Louisiana in Congress,” he said in part. “The
faithful Roosevelt Congressmen had gone down there to put the Long
crowd out.... Here is what happened among the Congressmen representing
Roosevelt the first, the last and the littlest.”
Holding aloft what he said was a transcript of the dictograph record, he
listed the names of those present, naming a collector of internal
revenue, an FERA manager for the state, and giving as the first direct
quote of one of the conferees a statement made by one Oscar Whilden, a
burly horse-and-mule dealer who had headed an anti-Long direct-action
group calling itself the Square Deal Association. Whilden was quoted as
saying at the very opening of the meeting that “I am out to murder,
kill, bulldoze, steal or anything else to win this election!”
An unidentified voice mentioned that the anti-Long faction would be
aided by more “income tax indictments, and there will be some more
convictions. They tell me O. K. Allen will be the next to be indicted.”
“That,” explained Mr. Long for the benefit of his hearers and the press
gallery, “is the governor of Louisiana. Send them down these culprits
and thieves and thugs who openly advocate murdering people, and who have
been participants in the murder of some people and in their undertaking
to murder others--send them down these thugs and thieves and culprits
and rascals who have been placed upon Government payrolls, drawing from
five to six thousand dollars a year, to carry on and wage war in the
name of the sacred flag, the Stars and Stripes. That is the kind of
government to which the administration has attached itself in the state
of Louisiana!”
Four of Louisiana’s congressmen were named as having taken part in the
caucus which Senator Long dubbed a “murder conference.” They were J. Y.
Sanders, Jr., Cleveland Dear, Numa Montet, and John Sandlin. But it was
another of the conferees whom Senator Long quoted next, reading from
the transcript, as suggesting that “we have Dear to make a trip around
the state and then announce that the people want him to run for
Governor, and no one will know about this arrangement here ... as you
all know we must all keep all of this a secret and not even tell our own
families of what is done.” Whereupon, according to the record, another
voice proposed that “we should make fellows like Farley and Roosevelt
and the suffering corporations ... cough up enough to get rid of that
fellow.”
Commented Senator Long: “Yes, we should make the Standard Oil Company
and the ‘suffering corporations’ cough up enough ... says Mr. Sandlin
... [but] I am going to teach my friends in the Senate how to lick this
kind of corruption. I am going to show them how to lick it to a
shirttail finish.... I am going to give you a lesson in January to show
you that the crookedness and rottenness and corruption of this
Government, however ably [_sic!_] financed and however many big
corporations join in it, will not get to first base.”
More of the same sort of dialogue was read from the transcript.
Congressman Sandlin assured the meeting that President Roosevelt will
“endorse our candidate.” Another of the conferees, one O’Rourke, was
described by Long as having refused to testify when another witness at
an inquiry into one of Huey Long’s earlier murder-plot charges “swore
that he had hired O’Rourke to commit murder in Baton Rouge. I was the
man he was to kill so there was not much said about it except that he
refused to testify on the ground that he would incriminate himself,
whereupon Roosevelt employed him. He was qualified and he was
appointed.”
The statement most frequently quoted in the weeks and months that
followed was that of an unidentified voice which the transcript reported
as saying: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would
take only one man, one gun and one bullet.” And some time thereafter,
according to the transcript, another unidentified voice declared that “I
haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon any one who
killed Long.” Thereupon someone asked: “But how could it be done?” and
the reply was: “The best way would be to just hang around Washington and
kill him right in the Senate.”
The conference was adjourned after notifying Congressman Dear that the
people would clamor to have him run for governor of Louisiana. (The
significance of this is that in one of Dear’s final campaign speeches he
made the statement that gave rise to a widely disseminated and still
persistent version of the shooting that followed, by almost exactly one
month, the delivery of Long’s attack on the New Deal.)
Long concluded his address to the Senate with the assertion that he had
exposed this presumably hush-hush meeting “to the United States Senate
and, I hope, to the country ... and I wish to announce further they have
sent additional inspectors and various other bureaucrats down in the
State....
“The State of Louisiana has no fear whatever of any kind of tactics thus
agreed upon and thus imposed. The State of Louisiana will remain a
state. When you hear from the election returns in the coming January ...
Louisiana will not have a government imposed on it that represents
murder, blackmail, oppression or destitution.”
The Senate then resumed the business of the day. But most of the
correspondents in the press gallery had left and the talk was all of
Huey Long’s excoriation of the New Deal, of his promise that “if it is
in a Presidential primary, they will hear from the people of the United
States,” and of his declaration that rumors of the New Deal leaders
plotting to have him murdered were now “fully verified.”
NOTE: Most of the purely local references, repetitions, adversions to
extraneous matters, and the like have been omitted from the foregoing
condensation of Senator Long’s last speech before the Senate. Those who
may wish to read the full text of his address will find it in the
_Congressional Record_ for August 9, 1935, pages 12780 through 12791.
The section headed “The Plan of Robbery, Murder, Blackmail, or Theft”
begins on page 12786, second column.
4 ---- AUGUST 30 TO SEPTEMBER 2
“_Behold, my desire is that mine adversary had written a book. Surely
I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown to me._”
----JOB
Congress did not adjourn its 1935 session until seventeen days after
Senator Long had delivered his blast about “the plan of robbery, murder,
blackmail, or theft” at the Roosevelt administration in general and at
its head in particular. This was, as he clearly stated in his reference
to presidential primaries, the opening move in launching his 1936
candidacy for president; the next step would be publication and
distribution of _My First Days in the White House_.
He devoted himself to revision of this manuscript during the fortnight
in which Congress remained in session, and marveled at the difficulties
he encountered. Like many another magnetic orator, he was no writer, and
in spite of the ghosts who had helped bring it into being, _My First
Days in the White House_ eloquently testifies to that fact. None the
less, had he lived, the book would have won him adherents by the
million. In all its naïve oversimplification, it was still a triumph of
classical composition beside the helter-skelter phraseology of his
senatorial and stump-speaking oratory. But the latter, like his many
other public utterances, his early political circulars, and even the
jumbled prose of his first book: _Every Man a King_, had been accepted
almost as gospel by Longolators who jeered at literate anti-Long
editorials as propaganda dictated and paid for by the Money Barons.
Congress did adjourn in due course, and now it is time to follow Long
almost hour by hour through the final ten days of his life, assembling
an unbiased chronicle in order to dispel myths and reveal truths about
his assassination. His first concern was the publication of his book.
His only other fixed commitment before having Governor Allen call the
legislature into special session for the enactment of a final dossier of
dictatorship laws, was delivery of a Labor Day address at Oklahoma City
on September 2. He had accepted this invitation gladly, since it would
afford him an opportunity to couple evangelistic grandiloquence about
wealth-sharing with kind words about blind Senator Thomas Gore, who
faced stiff opposition in his campaign for re-election.
Earle Christenberry was left in charge of the Washington office, where
he was to pack for transportation all documents and records which might
be needed to elect a Long-endorsed governor and other state officials in
Louisiana. Meanwhile, Mr. Long with the manuscript of his book and three
of his bodyguards went to New York for a few days of relaxation.
It was also part of his long-range design to seek the Democratic Party’s
nomination for president at the 1936 convention. To be sure, he was
under no misconception as to the sort of fate this bid would encounter.
For one thing, Roosevelt’s personal popularity had reached new heights
as his first term drew to a close. His nomination for a second term was
all but inevitable. Long had attacked not only the administration as
such. He was carrying on corrosive personal feuds with Postmaster
General Farley, Interior Secretary Ickes, NRA Administrator Hugh
Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, and a host of other party
bigwigs.
Naturally, Louisiana’s Kingfish realized fully that these leaders,
controlling the party machinery in the convention of 1936, would see to
it not merely that F.D.R. received a virtually unanimous nomination for
a second term, but that even were Roosevelt eliminated from contention,
Huey Long’s effort to become the party’s standard bearer would be
rejected.
Unquestionably, that is exactly what the Kingfish wanted. He already had
a virtually crackproof national organization in his swiftly expanding
Share-Our-Wealth clubs. The growth of this movement was now so rapid
that his staff found difficulty in keeping pace with it. So valuable had
its name become that both “Share _Our_ Wealth” and “Share _the_ Wealth”
were copyrighted in Earle Christenberry’s name.
Long’s purpose was to rally from both the Republican and Democratic
camps the many who were still embittered by their struggles to escape
the Great Depression. Times had undeniably bettered. The economy would
reach a peak figure in 1937. But even the WPA “shovel leaners” were
convinced that the government owed them much more than was being doled
out on payday, and were entranced by the vision of a future in which
Huey Long would soak the rich to provide for each toiler, however lowly
his station, an income of $5000 a year and a span of mules.
In the prairie corn and wheat belts, in the Dakotas and in Oklahoma, in
all the places where Long had preached wealth-sharing while campaigning
for Roosevelt, desperate landowners on the verge of eviction from
mortgaged or tax-delinquent acres their forebears had carved out of the
wilderness, were still rallying their friends and neighbors to help keep
potential bidders from foreclosure auctions. These too would recall
Long’s clamorous efforts to bring the Frazier-Lemke bill to a vote, and
the conservatives’ success in holding it back from the floor. One and
all, they would read _My First Days in the White House_, and they would
learn in its pages how readily a wealth-sharing miracle could come to
pass if only Huey Long were president....
None the less, publishers were chary of bringing out the book under
their imprint. To Long this was no matter for concern. Over a period of
at least three years a war chest for the presidential campaign he
planned to wage in 1936 had been growing steadily. It included not
merely money--a levy on the salaries of all public employees under his
domination in Louisiana, and major campaign contributions from
corporations that felt themselves obligated to show tangible
appreciation for past favors or sought to insure themselves against
future reprisal--it included also a solid stockpile of affidavits about
the boondoggles of divers federal agencies. Hard-pressed men, driven to
almost any lengths by the crying need of their families for such bare
necessities as food and shelter, were being forced to promise they would
“praise Roosevelt and cuss Long” before being granted a WPA laborer’s
pittance.
At the outset of Long’s senatorial career this entire trove of cash and
documentary dynamite was kept in some strongboxes of the Mayflower
Hotel, where the Senator first established his capitol residence. But
for various reasons, at least one of which was the hotel’s refusal to
bar his political opponents from registering there while in Washington,
his relations with the Mayflower deteriorated rapidly to the point where
he moved to the Broadmoor, at 3601 Connecticut Avenue. The view from one
of the windows of his apartment overlooking Rock Creek Park charmed him.
At the same time the campaign cash and documents were transferred to the
safety-deposit vaults of the Riggs National Bank, where the Senator kept
a Washington checking account, or rather, where Earle Christenberry kept
it for him.
Hence the question of paying for the publication of _My First Days in
the White House_ presented no problem. For that matter, neither did the
seeming permanence of a few scattered centers of anti-Long resistance in
Louisiana. Since the dictatorship laws enacted during the previous
twelvemonth made it virtually impossible to defeat Long proposals in the
legislature, or Long candidates at the polls, the fixity of a few
isolated opposition enclaves was desirable because, to quote Mr. Long,
“it gives me somebody to cuss out, and I can’t make a speech that’s
worth a damn unless I’m raising hell about what my enemies are doing.”
Only one stubborn stronghold of this sort really irked him by its
refusal to capitulate. This was the parish of St. Landry, whose seat was
Opelousas. Always independent of alien dictation, this fourth-largest
county in Louisiana had remained uncompromisingly anti-Long under the
leadership of a couple of patriarchal autocrats: Judge Benjamin Pavy,
tall, heavy-set, and wide-shouldered, with a roundish countenance
against whose rather sallow complexion a white mustache stood out in
sharp contrast; and District Attorney Lee Garland, short and plump, his
features pink beneath a flowing crest of white hair.
Garland, much the elder, had held office continuously for forty-four
years, Judge Pavy for twenty-eight. The latter had been elected to the
district bench in 1908, after an exceptionally bitter local contest in
which the leader of the anti-Pavy forces, Sheriff Marion Swords, went so
far as to charge that one of Ben Pavy’s distant relatives-in-law was an
individual the purity of whose Caucasian ancestry was open to challenge.
Since Judge Pavy was elected not only then, but continuously thereafter
for the next twenty-eight years in election after election, it is
obvious the report was given no credence at the time. With the passage
of years, the incident was forgotten.
The situation in the parish of St. Landry would not have disturbed Huey
Long too greatly, had there not been the possibility that in some
future state Supreme Court election the heavy vote of that parish might
upset the high tribunal’s political four-to-three Long-faction majority.
On this ground alone it might be important for the Kingfish to alter the
political climate of the St. Landry judicial district before the larger
demands of an approaching presidential campaign monopolized his time and
energy.
A matter of prestige was likewise involved. It was Long’s purpose to
take the stump personally in the St. Landry area, in order to bring
about the defeat of its heavily entrenched Pavy-Garland faction and
score a personal triumph. On the other hand, if through some mischance
his persuasive oratory and the well-drilled efficiency of his cohorts
failed to carry the day, the result would be hailed not merely in
Louisiana, but throughout the nation, as a personal defeat for the
Kingfish. Hence, nothing must be left to chance. Matters must be so
arranged that failure was to all intents and purposes impossible.
This involved no very serious difficulties. Earlier that summer, when he
first outlined to his lieutenants plans for liquidating the Pavy-Garland
entente as a politically potent factor, he gave orders to prepare for a
special session of the legislature, this one to be called as soon as
Congress adjourned. Once convened, the lawmakers were to gerrymander St.
Landry from the thirteenth into the fifteenth judicial district. This
would leave Evangeline (Dr. Vidrine’s home bailiwick), small but
overwhelmingly pro-Long, as the only parish in the thirteenth district,
thus assuring the election of a friendly judge there.
At the same time, it would annex St. Landry to another district which
already included three large pro-Long parishes. Admittedly, the enlarged
district would be given two judges instead of one, but under the new
arrangement neither could possibly be elected without Long’s
endorsement.
Senator Long took it for granted that his wishes--commands,
rather--would be complied with at once. But some close friends earnestly
urged him to forgo the gerrymander, at least temporarily. Political
feeling was running too high as matters stood to risk possible violence,
perhaps even a popular uprising, through such high-handed and summary
procedures. Reluctantly, he agreed to hold this particular project in
abeyance, but only for the moment.
At the close of August, however, with Congress in adjournment, and in
view of the need to neutralize the federal government’s policy of
patronage distribution solely for the benefit of his political foes back
home, he decided that the time for action was at hand. Once more he sent
word to Baton Rouge that preparations for a special legislative session,
the fourth of that calendar year, be started without further delay. It
should be convened on the night of Saturday, September 7.
Meanwhile certain bills, embodying the statutory changes he wanted,
should be drafted forthwith by Executive Counsel George Wallace, so that
he--Huey--could check their wording in advance, and make any amendments
he deemed necessary. This must be done with secrecy--not the sort of
puerile intrigue with which his opponents had assembled their hotel
conference, but under a tight cloak of concealment, so as to catch the
opposition unawares. The gerrymander that would retire Judge Pavy to
private life was to be the first measure introduced and passed, becoming
House Bill Number One and later Act Number One. The date of the state’s
congressional primaries was also to be moved up from September 1936 to
January. These should be held at the same time as the primaries for
governor and other elective state officers. And there was another
measure, one still in the planning stage, the details of which he would
give later; something to take the sting out of Roosevelt’s punitive
dispensation of federal patronage in Louisiana.
Having disposed of these matters, Long left Washington for New York with
three of his most trusted bodyguards--Murphy Roden, Paul Voitier, and
Theophile Landry. All he had in mind at the moment was a day or two of
relaxation. August 30 was his birthday. He would be forty-two years old.
This in itself called for some sort of celebration. Besides, in view of
the busy weeks ahead--the Labor Day speech in Oklahoma on September 2,
the special session of the legislature, the need to rush _My First Days
in the White House_ into print, the fall and winter campaign for state
offices, the presidential campaign to follow--this might well be, for no
one knew how long, his last opportunity for casual diversion.
“We flew to New York from Washington,” Captain Landry recalls, “and went
straight to the New Yorker Hotel, where they always put the Senator in a
suite on the thirty-second floor. We got there on August 29. I remember
that because the next day, a Friday, was his birthday, and Ralph Hitz,
the owner of the hotel, sent up a big birthday cake. Lila Lee, a New
Orleans girl who was vocalist for Nick Lucas’ band that was playing the
New Yorker’s supper room, came up to the suite with the cake to sing
Happy-birthday-dear-Huey. After the cake had been cut and we all had a
taste of it, he gave the rest to Miss Lee.
“About that time Lou Irwin came up to take us out to dinner. I think the
Senator had talked to him on the phone about finding someone to publish
his book, and that Lou had said this was out of his line, since he was a
theatrical agent, but he would inquire around and see what could be
done. Earle Christenberry wasn’t with us. He had remained in Washington
to gather up all the things the Senator might need in Louisiana, papers
and so on, and he was going to take his time driving home with them
while we went on to Oklahoma City.
“Anyway, Lou Irwin said he had just booked a show into some place
uptown. I have forgotten the name of it; all I remember is it was quite
a ways uptown, and Lou told us they had just imported from France some
chef that made the best onion soup in the world.
“So we went there to eat, and we had hardly sat down when who should
come over to our table but Phil Baker, the radio star. He said:
‘Senator, I want you to meet the two most beautiful girls in New York,
my wife Peggy and her niece.’ I don’t remember the niece’s name, but she
was a young girl that looked to be about eighteen, and she was very
pretty. Baker was all excited, talking about having just signed a
contract that very day with the Gulf Refining people to take over their
radio show, the one Will Rogers, who got killed in a plane crash with
Wiley Post up in Alaska a couple of weeks before that, used to do.”
The name of the niece was Cleanthe Carr. Her father, Gene Carr, was one
of the best-known cartoonists and comic-strip originators in the
country. His work was widely syndicated.
“The Senator got up to dance with Mrs. Baker,” the Landry account
continues, “and she must have told him, while they were dancing, about
this niece being an artist, because when they came back to the table he
picked up a napkin and gave it to this girl, saying: ‘Young lady, I
understand you’re quite a cartoonist. Let’s see you sketch me here on
this napkin!’ Well, she made a perfect sketch of him, with his arms out
and his hair flying, as though he were making a hell-fire speech. He
thought the sketch was fine, but Phil Baker said we ought to see some of
her serious work, and we all should come up to his apartment, where he
had quite a few of the paintings she had done.
“So we left. I don’t think Lou Irwin came with us. But anyway, after we
had been quite a long while at the Baker apartment, Senator Long said
the niece would have to do the pictures for his book that he had written
about how he was already elected president and what he did in the White
House to redistribute the wealth after he was inaugurated. By the time
we got back to the hotel it was three o’clock in the morning.
“The Senator went over to the newsstand to look at the headlines in the
morning papers, and a gentleman who had been in the lobby when we came
in got up and came over to me and asked if my name was Captain Landry. I
told him yes, that was right, and he said he wanted to talk to Mr. Long.
I said: ‘Man, don’t you see what time it is? You haven’t got a chance to
see him now. You better come back tomorrow.’
“So he said it was very important for him to talk to the Senator right
away, that he had been sent up from Washington by Earle Christenberry,
and that was how he knew what my name was. He also said he represented
the Harrisburg _Telegraph_ Publishing Company in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, and they were anxious to publish the Senator’s book about
his first days in the White House. Naturally, that made a difference,
because that was one of the things Senator Long had come to New York
for, so I went across the lobby to the newsstand and told him what the
story was.
“At first he said he wasn’t about to talk to anybody that time of night,
but when I told him how Earle had sent the man up special because the
Harrisburg _Telegraph_ people wanted to publish the book, and how the
man said he had just missed us when we went out to supper, and had been
waiting in the lobby ever since, the Senator said: ‘Well, all right,
then. Tell him to come up to 3200 in about ten minutes, but make him
understand he’ll have to talk damn fast when he gets there.’ So I did,
and the man--I have forgotten his name; that’s if I ever knew it--didn’t
have to talk so fast after all, because the meeting didn’t break up
till after five o’clock, when we all just about barely had time to get
packed and catch the first train for Harrisburg.
“This was Saturday morning, August 31, and we went from the station at
Harrisburg right to the office of the newspaper and I know they must
have reached an agreement about printing the book, because when we left
by train for St. Louis that evening, two stenographers and a sort of
editor from the Harrisburg _Telegraph_ came along, and they were working
most of the night and all the next morning, cutting down the manuscript
for this book. It was too long the way it was written. Anyhow, as I
remember, they cut out two hundred pages, and finished just about the
time we got ready to cross the bridge and pull into St. Louis, where we
only had about five minutes to change to the train for Oklahoma City.
“This was a Sunday morning, and while I don’t know how the word had got
around St. Louis that Huey Long was passing through, I tell you that old
station there was packed and jammed like nobody ever saw before, with
people that were not working, it being Sunday, so they just wanted to
catch one glimpse of the man while he was passing through.”
Senator Long, Theophile Landry, and Paul Voitier, another bodyguard,
reached Oklahoma City late that afternoon. Only one public official,
Mayor Frank Martin, was at the station to greet the distinguished
visitor.
“Officials in Fadeout as Huey Lands” headlined the Oklahoma City
_Times_. Most conspicuous among the absentees was State Labor
Commissioner W. A. Murphy who, when invited by the local Trades and
Labor Council some days earlier to appear jointly with Long as one of
the Labor Day speakers, replied:
“I won’t be near or in a parade or program with that fellow.... A man
trying to destroy the only President who ever tried to help union labor
doesn’t deserve the support of labor, let alone being its guest.”
Long was suffering from an attack of hay fever and from near-exhaustion
when he reached the Black Hotel. He had had almost no sleep since the
previous Friday morning. But he was in better spirits the next day when
he greeted among others Kaye Dawson, the produce merchant for whom he
had been a part-time salesman in Norman during his brief interlude of
trying to work his way through the law school of the University of
Oklahoma. It is worth noting, however, that when Dawson invited him to
visit his home, Long stipulated that both Landry and Voitier be included
in the invitation.
He rode in the Labor Day parade that morning, too, and returned to his
hotel suite to hold an impromptu press conference about his
Share-Our-Wealth program. But when one of the reporters asked him
whether he had ever pressed the charge, made only two or three weeks
earlier, that several Louisiana congressmen were plotting his death, he
snapped:
“I’m tired of talking. If you can’t stay here without asking questions,
get the hell out. Can’t you see I’m tired?”
That afternoon the Labor Day crowd at the Fair Grounds cheered his
speech lustily, even his attacks on Roosevelt and Hoover, whom he
compared to the peddler of two patent medicines, High Popalorum and Low
Popahiram, both being made from the bark of the same tree.
“But for one the peddler peeled the bark off from the top down,” he
explained, “and for the other he peeled it off from the bottom up. And
that’s the way it is at Washington. Roosevelt and his crowd are skinning
us from the ear down, and Hoover and the Republicans are doing the job
from the ankle up. But they’ve both been skinning us and there ain’t
either side left now.”
“Huey May Toss Hat,” headlined the _Oklahoman_ next day, and quoted
Huey’s promise that “if Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hoover are the nominees
next year, or anyone that looks like Roosevelt or Hoover, we will have
us another candidate.”
He left almost immediately after the rally, even though the only
available eastbound train would carry him no farther along the road to
Louisiana than Dallas. From that point he and his two bodyguards motored
to Shreveport, where they were met by another of the bodyguards, George
McQuiston, who had been dispatched from Baton Rouge in a state-police
car to await the Senator’s coming.
They passed the night at the Washington-Youree Hotel, where the Kingfish
conferred with his local political satraps. The following morning he and
his entourage left for Baton Rouge, arriving in time to begin a
day-and-night series of meetings with Governor Allen, George Wallace,
Secretary of State Eugene Conway, and others. There Landry and the
Senator parted company.
“He said for me to go to New Orleans and rest there, and go on a
vacation if I wanted to,” Landry added. “He said something about all of
us going on a vacation soon, just as soon as things in Baton Rouge got
settled. If only I had stayed with him I might have been where I could
save his life! But the one thing that never came into my mind was that
anybody would try anything in Baton Rouge. Not in Baton Rouge, where he
was always surrounded by some of us ... not in Baton Rouge where you’d
think he’d surely be safe....”
5 ---- SEPTEMBER 3 TO SEPTEMBER 7
“_There is nothing more difficult to undertake, more uncertain to
succeed, and more dangerous to manage, than to prescribe new laws._”
----MACHIAVELLI
Tuesday far into the night, throughout Wednesday, and again Thursday
until well past noon, Long labored with attorneys, officials,
secretaries, and typists, going over and over the measures to be
introduced when the forthcoming special legislative session was
convened. The streamlined rush with which such bills were speeded to
final enactment in less than five days did not allow for delays to
correct them once they had been dropped into the hopper.
The system that made this possible was not original with the Kingfish.
It had been devised by two astute parliamentarians, Oramel Simpson and
George Wallace, to meet the exigencies of a flood crisis in 1927.
By convening the legislature late at night, with all bills whipped into
final shape before the lawmakers assembled, having one member introduce
all the bills, suspending the rules to have them all referred at once,
and all to the same committee, regardless of content, what would
otherwise be delayed by being parceled out on two separate legislative
days could be accomplished in a matter of minutes.
Then, immediately after midnight, or even the next morning, the
committee could meet, gallop through the dossier, give all
administration-sponsored measures a favorable report, and turn thumbs
down on all anti-administration proposals (the record was forty-four
bills thus “considered” in an hour and seven minutes), report them back
to the House, and order them engrossed and put on the calendar for final
action the next morning. That would be another legislative day.
On the morrow the House would then pass the bills as fast as the clerk
could mumble a few words of the title and the members could press the
electric-voting-machine buttons. Immediately thereafter the bills would
be rushed across the corridor to the Senate, where the same routine
would be followed.
Thus the third legislative day in the House would also be the first
legislative day in the Senate, so that a few minutes after the fourth
midnight, the governor could sign the bills into law, each measure
having been read “in full” on three separate days in each house.
This was a brilliant device for meeting an emergency; the iniquity of it
lay in the fact that, when employed as routine, it shut off all real
study of the proposals, and barred opponents or representatives of the
public from being heard on them before committees.
* * * * *
By Thursday noon, September 5, everything was in readiness for the
introduction at a moment’s notice of thirty-one administration- (i.e.,
“Long”) sponsored must bills--all this without one official word to
indicate that a special session was so much as contemplated. None the
less, among the press correspondents in the capitol gallery it was taken
for granted that such an assembly would be convened at the weekend; but
when they pressed Senator Long to confirm or deny the surmise, he
professed complete ignorance.
“As far’s I know,” he said blandly, “Oscar hasn’t made up his mind
about if he’ll call one any time soon. Leastaways he never said a word
to me about it.”
“When are you going to make up his mind so he can tell you?” quipped one
of the reporters.
“He’d near about kill you if he heard you say that,” chuckled the
Kingfish good-naturedly, “and his wife would finish the job.”
He spent some time then chatting informally with rural well-wishers,
while waiting for Murphy Roden, who had driven the Cadillac with License
Plate Number 1 from Washington to New Orleans and was to call for its
owner that afternoon in Baton Rouge. The Senator was due to make one of
his fiery radio broadcasts over a state-wide hookup that night at eight
in the Roosevelt Hotel. After a late lunch at the Heidelberg Hotel
coffee shop he read the first installment of a biographical sketch of
his career which had just appeared on the newsstands that day in the
_Saturday Evening Post_. Then at length, with a group of friends and a
cadre of bodyguards to see him off, he left for New Orleans. The
bystanders urged him in parting to “pour it on ’em, Kingfish ... give
’em hell, Huey, you’re just the boy that can do it!” The party reached
the Roosevelt barely five minutes before he was scheduled to begin
broadcasting.
He spoke that night for a little more than three hours, interrupting the
early portion of his program from time to time to say, as was his custom
on such occasions:
“This is Senator Huey P. Long talking, and since the lying newspapers
won’t tell you these things, I’ll get the boys to play a little music
for the next five minutes or so, and while they’re doing that you go
call some friends and neighbors on the telephone and let them know I’m
on the air, and if they really want the truth they can turn on their
radios and tune in.”
One of the major proposals he made public that night was a project for
enabling unusually gifted high-school students to continue their
education through college at virtually no cost to themselves or their
parents. Education for the underprivileged--e.g., the free-schoolbook
law--had been one of the most potent elements in the grand strategy of
his drive for popular support when he first entered public life. It
highlighted the last public address of his career as well.
“One thousand boys and girls,” he pledged, “will be given a practically
free college education at L.S.U. next year. We’ll select the ones that
make the best grades and send them through college, a thousand of them
for a starter. I already asked Dr. Smith [Louisiana State University
president] whether he could do it beginning this fall, if we came up
with a hundred thousand dollars extra for the University appropriation,
and he said, well, he might be able to do it, anyway he would try. So I
asked him could he do it if we gave him an extra two hundred thousand
dollars, and he said yes indeed he sure could. So I told him we would
give him _three_ hundred thousand dollars just to make sure he had
enough.”
Of course he attacked the Roosevelt administration at the national level
and for its intrusion via patronage into the local arena of Louisiana
politics; and equally of course he “poured it on” Mayor Walmsley,
Congressman Sandlin, “the whole old plunderbund that you’ve done got rid
of once and that Roosevelt is trying to saddle back onto you.”
At intervals the musicians would play “Every Man a King,” and Senator
Long, who claimed authorship of the lyrics but could not carry a tune,
would recite one chorus to the band’s accompaniment; and once he recited
a chorus of “Sweetheart of L.S.U.,” for which he had also written the
lyrics to music composed by Castro Carrazo, the state university’s
bandmaster.
At the end of his three-hour stint he was driven to his home in posh
Audubon Boulevard and spent the night there with his family. But he was
up and away early enough the next morning--Friday--to eat breakfast in
the Roosevelt Hotel coffee shop, talking with an uninterrupted
succession of callers while he was at the table, and again in his
twelfth-floor suite, access to which could be gained only if one were
passed by a succession of bodyguards. Technically, these were officers
of the State Bureau of Investigation and Identification, which had come
into being during Long’s term as governor.
The bill creating it was introduced by an anti-Long member as a
nonpolitical measure, at a time when Louisiana had no state
constabulary. The jurisdiction of each sheriff and his deputies was
restricted to his county. What the backers of the new measure sought was
the creation of a force which, working in conjunction with the F.B.I.,
would have state-wide jurisdiction.
Instead of opposing this, on the ground that it was inspired by
political opponents, Long espoused it enthusiastically, and then turned
it into a personal elite guard whose powers were broader than those of
any mere local peace officer. Certain particularly trustworthy members
of the group were assigned to duty as his bodyguards.
They screened all who sought to approach him in his twelfth-floor
retreat at the Roosevelt where he remained throughout Friday, busily
instructing influential leaders on how best to speed the work of the
special session which would be convened on the following night. Earlier
he had summoned Earle Christenberry from his home to the hotel, hoping
to straighten out his income-tax situation. Two ninety-day postponements
on making a return had already been extended to him by the Bureau.
However, there would be no further extensions, he was told. A return
would have to be made by September 15. None the less, an unending stream
of visitors made it impossible for these two to seclude themselves to
prepare the belated return.
Much of the day’s discussion concerned itself with the potential
candidates for the Long slate in the approaching January election. Most
of the minor officials--state auditor, register of the land office,
commissioner of agriculture, and the like--would be endorsed for
re-election as a matter of course. All had been Long stalwarts for
years. But under the constitution a governor was prohibited from
succeeding himself, and since Justice Fournet’s elevation to the state
Supreme Court, the lieutenant-governorship had been filled by an acting
president pro tem of the Senate.
A number of top-echelon figures in the Long organization each advanced
claims to selection as gubernatorial candidate. Each regarded himself as
the logical choice.
Meanwhile, as late as Friday afternoon, the Kingfish continued to insist
to reporters who inquired about the rumored special session that “Oscar”
had not yet told him when or whether a summons to such a legislative
assembly would be issued ... and even while he was telling the newsmen
this, highway motorcycle officers were delivering to every rural doorway
in the state a circular which had been rushed into print at Baton Rouge
two days earlier.
The text on one side of this fly-sheet followed the standard pattern of
a Long attack on all who might oppose the program to be furthered by the
special session, those who “want to put [us] back into the hands of
thugs, thieves and scoundrels, who loaded the state down with debt and
gave the people nothing, who kept the people in the mud and deprived
their children of education....”
The other side of the sheet bore an equally vehement excoriation of
President Roosevelt and his regime, which was using the weight of
federal patronage and federal tax money to defeat “our” movement ...
“the man who promised to redistribute the wealth, but we know now he is
not going to keep his word....”
He remained in his suite until dinnertime, when he joined Seymour Weiss
in the Fountain Lounge, and made an engagement to play golf with him at
the Audubon Park Club’s course in the morning. To Earle Christenberry’s
admonition about the inescapable need to file his income tax before the
fifteenth he said:
“Come up to Baton Rouge Sunday morning, and we’ll work in the apartment
in the State House where we won’t be interrupted. Bring the papers with
you.”
He slept well that night--Friday--and rose refreshed to drive out to
Audubon Park with Seymour Weiss in the latter’s spandy-new Cadillac,
which had been delivered only the afternoon before, and would be ruined
the next night by the reckless speed with which, not yet broken in, it
was driven to Baton Rouge after news of the shooting reached New
Orleans.
The morning was pleasant, and Senator Long enjoyed the game to the
fullest. An indifferent golfer at best, he played primarily for the
thrill of sending an occasional long drive screaming down the fairway.
Whenever he achieved this, and more particularly if in doing so he
outdistanced his friend Seymour’s drive, he shouted with a delight which
not even an ensuing flubbed approach could quench.
The game also gave him an opportunity to discuss current developments
and problems with one of the few friends he trusted completely. That
Saturday he and Weiss seated themselves on a tee bench, and let foursome
after foursome go through while they talked in the only relative privacy
available to them. What about the federal patronage impasse?
“I told him,” Mr. Weiss recalls, “that some of the leaders were
worrying. After all, if the Walmsley-Sandlin people were the only ones
who could give out those federal jobs.... And he interrupted me at that
point and asked me had I ever heard of the tenth article of the Bill of
Rights? Well, of course I had, and told him so. He said yes, everybody
had heard of it, but did I realize what was in it?
“Then he went on to explain that while it was only about three lines
long, it provided that anything not specifically permitted to the
federal government or forbidden to the states by the Constitution was
straight-out reserved to the individual states or to the people.
“I said something like all right, so what then, and he said, as nearly
as I can remember his words: