Hermann B. Deutsch

“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.