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The Huey Long
Murder Case

by Hermann B. Deutsch

Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York, 1963

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-15869
Copyright © 1963 by Hermann B. Deutsch
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition

In Boundless Affection, This Modest Volume
Is Dedicated to
THE LYING NEWSPAPERS
A Generic Term Applied by Huey P. Long to
The Free Press of a Free Republic.
Especially is it dedicated to any and all who
during almost half a century have been
My Fellow Workers
As Typified by
John F. Tims and Ralph Nicholson
And Most Specially Is It Dedicated to the Memory of
Richard Finnegan and Marshall Ballard.

Contents

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.

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:

“‘So then there’s a bill going into that special session tonight—Oscar must have done issued the call by this time—providing a thousand-dollar fine and one hell of a heavy jail term for any federal employee who interferes with Louisiana’s rights under Article Ten. So anybody that uses federal funds to interfere with our program is going to be arrested and tried under the law we’re about to pass. That’ll give them something to think about up yonder.’

“I didn’t believe any such law as that could be made to hold water and said so, and even he admitted that it was open to interpretation, though he still thought it was perfectly sound. But he also said it wouldn’t make any difference because long before the question could reach the Supreme Court at Washington and be settled, that federal-patronage deal would be so badly scrambled up it wouldn’t affect the outcome of our election in January one bit. He also said he had been telling all our people to take every slick dime of Washington money that was offered to them, and then go to the polls and vote for our candidates, because his program would do more for them than they ever would get out of those lousy WPA jobs.

“The main thing he tried to impress on me that morning was that I could forget all my worries about the presidential campaign. ‘Everything’s in wonderful shape,’ he said to me. ‘It’s never been in better shape. All the money we’re going to need we already have in hand, I mean we’ve got it right now, not just pledges but cash; and on top of that we’ve got a load of affidavits and other documents about some of the things that have been going on, a stack of papers heavy enough to break down a bullock.’

“As I remember, I asked if this was the material in the vaults of the Riggs National Bank, and that was when he really surprised me. He said no, everything had been taken out of the Riggs vaults just a few days before he left Washington, and put in another place for safekeeping. But he didn’t say where he had put it, and I didn’t ask. After all, he was the one to decide where he wanted it, and why, and if the time ever came when it was important for me to know where it was, he would tell me. And besides, he was so confident about everything being in the best possible shape, so sure things couldn’t be better, that I felt no anxiety about it.

“‘We’re going to handle the campaign exactly the same way as we did in the West for that double-crossing Roosevelt in 1932,’ he told me. ‘Between us, we’ll pick out the main towns in each state, and you’ll go there five or six days in advance and try to line up someone who will serve as chairman of the meeting when I get there.’ That is how we did it in 1932, and it wasn’t always easy, because hunting for Democrats in the Dakotas in those days, or in Minnesota, was exactly like the old one about the needle in a haystack. In some of those towns there just wasn’t a Democrat. But I would stick to it and find someone, no matter who. If the only Democrat I could produce was a truck driver, all right. Huey would have a truck driver for chairman of the meeting he would address on behalf of Franklin Roosevelt for president.

“‘It’ll be a lot easier this time,’ Huey went on while we were talking during that Saturday golf game, ‘because you know and I know I make my best speeches when I’m taking the hide off of somebody. I never could make a decent Fourth of July oration in my whole damn life. But give me something to raise hell about and somebody to blame for doing it, like I had when I was campaigning for Mrs. Caraway in Arkansas, and nobody can stop me!

“‘Not only that, but you’ll get on the radio and give out interviews to the newspapers before I hit town, with all that same old business about this interesting and controversial personality that’s about to come to town, the man they had been reading and hearing so much about, and they would have this chance to come out and find out the truth for themselves. Also what date he’ll be there and so on, and how he would talk about a topic of importance to the whole country, and most of all to them, with Joe Whoozis to preside over the meeting, and that’ll draw a big crowd every time, no matter if they’re Democrats or what. And no matter if they’re Democrats or what I’ll have every last, living one of them talking and thinking and voting my way before I get through.’

“You see, all Huey ever wanted was to get a crowd in front of him. You could leave the rest to him. He had done just that in Arkansas three years before, and everything was better organized by 1935. Not only would I be there with arrangements and interviews, but the boys would have come to town and distributed literature and cartoon circulars to every house in the place and printed copies of some of Huey’s speeches about share-the-wealth and so on.

“‘We’ll do it just like Arkansas, only on a hell of a lot bigger scale,’ he said. ‘We’ll have all the copies we need of My First Days in the White House along with the Share-Our-Wealth book, which we didn’t have in ’32, and when I come to town with the sound trucks and deliver the speech of my life, you just watch them flock over to our side.... Yes, sure, there’s enough money to pay for all those books and pamphlets and everything else we’ll need.’

“How much money was in that box? I haven’t any idea, and I don’t think anyone else ever knew. It came from all sorts of sources. State and city employees contributed two per cent of their pay for campaign purposes. Those were the so-called deducts. Then there were campaign contributions from people who disliked Roosevelt and believed Huey could whip him, and didn’t care whether he called himself Republican or Democrat or Vegetarian, just so long as he licked Roosevelt or made it possible for somebody else to lick him. Also, there were contributions from people who were under obligations to Huey, like the banks he kept solvent in Louisiana. I don’t believe even he had any idea how much the total came to. A million, maybe; maybe several millions. All I know for certain sure is that he said for me not to worry about financing the campaign, that we had every round dollar we ever would need of campaign expenses already put away for safekeeping after he took it out of the Riggs bank vaults—and to this day nobody has ever been able to find out what became of it!

“During the course of our game that morning, walking down the fairways, we talked a lot about the governorship too. As I remember it, Huey mentioned a number of names, and some he said just didn’t have what it’d take to run a state, and about some he said he didn’t want to buck the north Louisiana prejudice against voting for a Catholic for governor, because there was no use making a campaign any harder than you absolutely had to, even if you could win it anyway.

“The one thing he said we’d have to be careful about was that if he picked one of the half dozen or so that regarded themselves each one as the rightful Long candidate, he would make some of the others so sore there would be a chance of a split in the party, and that was one thing he wanted to avoid.

“Well, with all our time out for talking, it was about two o’clock in the afternoon when we finished our round. He had certainly seemed to enjoy it, both the exercise and the chance to talk without having every Tom, Dick, and Harry coming over to interrupt and say he just wanted to shake hands. Also it must have been a relief to be able to talk without worrying about people listening in or repeating what he was supposed to have said.

“We went back to the hotel for lunch. He said there was no need of me coming up to Baton Rouge either that night or the next day, as the first time the bills would come up for passage would be in the House on Monday morning; it would be just routine up to that time. So I said Bob Maestri [State Conservation Commissioner and later for ten years mayor of New Orleans] and I would be in Baton Rouge on Monday morning, and then we parted. Murphy Roden had been waiting to drive Huey to the capitol, and they left, right after lunch. Everything indicated the going would be so smooth and easy. Who could have dreamed that the next time I saw him, only a day later, he would be waiting for Dr. Maes to come up from New Orleans and try to save his life?”

Baton Rouge’s hotel lobbies and the State House corridors alike were crowded by the time Murphy Roden and the Senator reached the skyscraper capitol, where they went at once to his apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. He had the state maintain a suite for him there because he felt that at that height the freedom from pollen and dust enabled him to sleep better.

Most of the House members were already on hand, but many of the senators did not trouble to put in an appearance until the following day. Since all bills were to be introduced in the House, the Senate had nothing more momentous on its agenda than to meet, answer roll call, listen to the chaplain’s invocation, and appoint two committees. One of these would solemnly inform the governor, and the other the House, that the Senate of Louisiana was lawfully convened and ready for business. Having conveyed this somewhat less than startling intelligence, the token quorum by which a constitutional mandate had been fulfilled could, and in fact did, adjourn until Monday afternoon, at which time all bills duly passed by the lower house would be laid before them.

These would be headed by House Bill Number One, the anti-Pavy gerrymander, and a somewhat similar measure which was designed to keep Congressman J. Y. Sanders, Jr., from returning to his home in Baton Rouge to run for a judgeship. His father, a former governor and congressman, stood at the very head of Huey Long’s bête noire list. Another measure high on Long’s “must” roster made provision for the fact that his current senatorial term would expire unless renewed in the fall of 1936 by re-election.

But in one-party Louisiana, the Democratic primary was the only actual election, even though technically it selected merely a party nominee. Its date was fixed for September by the state election law as this statute currently stood. Obviously, a campaign for a senatorial primary to be held in the fall of 1936 would play hob with Long’s plans to run against Roosevelt for the presidency that same season. Consequently, one of Huey’s thirty-one must bills amended the state election law by setting the primary’s date ahead from September to January. Thus Mr. Long could win the Democratic nomination (equivalent to election in Louisiana) for senator at the year’s outset; with that as paid-up political insurance he would be free to devote the balance of 1936 to his presidential campaign.

Another of the must bills is significant in this connection in spite of the fact that it was rooted in a strictly personal grudge, because it so strikingly exemplifies the savagery with which at an earlier stage of his career Long made Negro affiliation the prime target of political attack.

Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Southwest Louisiana Acadian, had run for governor several times, had been a legislator off and on, and would one day become a millionaire as author and high priest of a nostrum called Hadacol. He and Long had been allies as members of the Public Service Commission in the old days, but had fallen out and had been at swords’ points ever since.

Defeated by the Kingfish when he sought to retain his office, LeBlanc organized a burial-insurance society of a type immensely popular among the Negroes. Since he catered primarily to this segment of the population, he put in a Negro nominal president of the “coffin club,” as Long invariably called it. In the columns of his weekly newspaper, The American Progress, Long thereafter lost no opportunity to reproduce what purported to be one of the brochures issued by LeBlanc’s company, showing pictures of LeBlanc and the Negro officers of the company together. Ultimately, Long had a law passed banning from Louisiana that type of insurance society.

LeBlanc thereafter moved the company’s home office across the state line into Texas, and continued in business. Although no longer pillorying opponents by reason of Negro affiliation, Long included in his must bills a prohibition against publishing, printing, or broadcasting in Louisiana any advertising matter by insurance companies not authorized to do business in the state.

Occupied with these and a thousand and one other such minutiae of legislative procedure, Long remained on the main floor of the capitol that Saturday night until the House adjourned, trailing a nimbus of bodyguards as he dashed back and forth between Governor Allen’s office and the House chamber. Some of his leading supporters tried vainly to keep up with him: Dr. Vidrine, “Cousin Jessie” Nugent, Dr. Clarence Lorio, Louisiana State University president James Monroe Smith. These had little to occupy them, for all the must bills were introduced by their “official” author, Chairman Burke of the Ways and Means Committee; and under a suspension of the rules, each was immediately referred to Mr. Burke’s committee as quickly as he could say “Ways and Means” and Speaker Ellender could utter a contrapuntal “Any objections? Hearing none, so ordered!”

Thrill seekers behind the railings and in the gallery had anticipated at least some show of oratorical fireworks. Disappointed when they found the proceedings about as exciting as listening to a couple of clerks take inventory in the kitchenware stockroom of a department store, they drifted away and left the capitol for their homes, while Long and the faithful Murphy Roden retired to the Senator’s twenty-fourth-floor retreat.

6 —— September 8: Morning

“Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be on his shoulder and his name shall be called Wonderful.”

——ISAIAH

Young Dr. Carl Weiss, his wife, and his baby son occupied a modest home on Lakeland Drive, not far from the capitol, and therefore likewise conveniently near Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, where he did most of his surgical work. The capitol had been built on what was formerly the state university campus. From its north façade the windows of the governor’s office looked out across a small, artificial body of water, still known as University Lake, to the big hospital on the opposite bank.

Thus Dr. Weiss, Jr., and Huey Long were within but a few blocks of one another when they rose early Sunday morning. Yvonne Pavy Weiss rose early too. Together she and her husband woke, fed and dressed their three-months-old son, Carl Austin Weiss III, and went with him to the home of Dr. Weiss, Sr., where two doting grandparents fondly took over the baby’s care, while the young couple went to Mass. As the elder Dr. Weiss put it in a subsequent statement:

“I was with [my son] practically all day. He and his wife came with their baby to our house early in the morning. They left the baby with me and my wife while they went to St. Joseph’s Church for Mass. After that, his wife returned to our house, while my son went to Scheinuk’s

“Mr. Scheinuk gave my son a bouquet of flowers, saying he had not sent any flowers when the baby was born, and my son came home saying: ‘Look what Mr. Scheinuk sent the baby.’ My son and his wife then went to their home, and returned to take dinner at my house at 1 P.M.”

Dr. Weiss, Jr., was twenty-nine years old. He had been graduated at fifteen from Baton Rouge High School and had begun his premedical work at Louisiana State University, transferring to Tulane, where he received his academic degree as Bachelor of Science in 1925, and his degree as Doctor of Medicine in 1927.

“He served as an intern at Tulane,” his father once related, “and then at the American Hospital in Paris. He studied under the masters at Vienna, and after completing his work in Paris, served at Bellevue Hospital in New York. The last six months of his stay at Bellevue he was chief of clinic. He then came to Baton Rouge to practice here.”

He had sailed from Hoboken on the George Washington on September 19, 1928, and returned to New York on May 19, 1930, aboard the American Farmer. On his customs declaration, filed when re-entering the United States, he listed $247 worth of purchases made during his twenty months abroad, including twenty dollars’ worth of surgical instruments, a forty-five dollar camera, five dollars’ worth of fencing equipment, old swords for which he had paid six dollars, and a pistol for which he had paid eight dollars, a small Belgian automatic, made on the Browning patents.