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.