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....”