Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards they get from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has beer trucked up from Texas—stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows. That, I suppose, is why for twenty-five years I underrated Huey Pierce Long. During the early thirties, as a feature writer for a New York evening paper, I interviewed him twice—once at the brand-new Waldorf and once at the brand-new Hotel New Yorker. The city desk showed what it thought of him by sending me instead of a regular political reporter; the idea was that he might say something funny but certainly nothing important. He said neither. Both times, he received me in his pajamas, lying on top of his bed and scratching himself. It was a routine he had made nationally famous in 1930, when, as Governor of Louisiana, he so received the official call of the commander of a German cruiser visiting New Orleans, causing the Weimar Republic to make diplomatic representations. New York reporters couldn’t figure out how he expected to get space with the same gag every time he came to town, but now I think I understand. He was from a country that had not yet entered the era of mass communications. In Louisiana, a stump speaker still tells the same joke at every stop on a five-speech afternoon. He has a different audience each time, like an old vaudeville comic, and Huey just hadn’t realized that when a gag gets national circulation it’s spoiled.
It was the same with his few remarks intended to be serious. He would boast of free schoolbooks, which we had had in New York since before he was born, and good roads, which ditto. Then, talking in the shadow of the new Empire State Building, he would brag about the thirty-four-story Capitol he had built in Baton Rouge. As for the eight bodyguards he brought with him, they seemed in New York an absurd affectation; didn’t he know we had cops? And who would bother to shoot him anyway It is hard to put yourself across as a buffoon and a potential martyr at the same time, and Huey did not convince us in either role. A chubby man, he had ginger hair, and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. It was an uneasy color combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt. His face faintly suggested mumps, and he once tipped the theatre-ticket girl in the lobby of the Hotel New Yorker three cents for getting him four tickets to a show that was sold out for a month in advance.
Late last July, I was in Baton Rouge, and I took a taxi out to the Capitol, where he is buried. Standing by Huey’s grave, I had him in a different perspective. A heroic, photographically literal statue of him stands on a high pedestal above his grave in the Capitol grounds. The face, impudent, porcine, and juvenile, is turned toward the building he put up—all thirty-four stories of it—in slightly more than a year, mostly with federal money. The bronze double-breasted jacket, tight over the plump belly, has already attained the dignity of a period costume, like Lincoln’s frock coat. In bronze, Huey looks like all the waggish fellows from Asheville and Nashville, South Bend and Topeka who used to fill our costlier speakeasies in the late twenties and early thirties. He looks like a golf-score-and-dirty-joke man, anxious for the good opinion of everybody he encounters. Seeing him there made me feel sad and old. A marble Pegasus carved in bas-relief below his feet bears a scroll that says “Share Our Wealth.” That was one of Huey’ s slogans; another was “Every Man a King.”
I walked along well-tended paths between melancholy Southern trees to the entrance of the Capitol, which is reached by forty-eight granite steps, each bearing the name of a state, in order of admission to the Union; to include Alaska and Hawaii, Louisiana will have to raise the Capitol. My taxi-driver, a tall, prognathous type who was a small boy when Huey was killed, had parked his cab somewhere and now sociably rejoined me. “The newspapers gave old Huey hell when he built that for five mil-li-on,” he said, waving toward the skyscraper. “You couldn’t build it now for a hundred mil-li-on.” He talked of Huey as a contemporary, the way some people in Springfield, Illinois, talk of Lincoln.
Inside the Capitol, which is air-cooled, I paused, breathless with gratitude. Outside, the heat was pushing a hundred. The interior of the building is faced with agate, porphyry, basalt, alabaster, and such—more than thirty kinds of stone, the Louisiana Guide says. It is the richest thing in its line after the barbershop in the St. Regis. The rotunda, as slick as mortuary slabs on end, reminded me pleasurably of Grant’s and Napoleon’s tombs, the shrines that early fixed my architectural tastes forever. Marble, high ceilings, and a reverential hush are the things I like inside a public building—they spell class. In addition to all this, and air-conditioning, the Capitol has its legend, and perhaps its ghost, hurrying along the corridor at the rear of the first floor. Looking around, I thought of what the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana had told me a day earlier about how Huey was shot in this monument he had erected to himself.
At sixty-four, the Chief Justice, the Honorable John Baptiste Fournet, is still a formidable figure of a man—tall and powerful, and presenting what might be considered in another state the outward appearance of a highly successful bookmaker. The suit he had on when I saw him, of rich, snuff-colored silk, was cut with the virtuosity that only subtropical tailors expend on hot-weather clothing. Summer clothes in the North are makeshifts, like seasonal slipcovers on furniture, and look it. The Chief Justice wore a diamond the size of a Colossal ripe olive on the ring finger of his left hand, and a triangle of flat diamonds as big as a trowel in his tie. His manner was imbued with a gracious warmth not commonly associated with the judiciary, and his voice reflected at a distance of three centuries the France from which his ancestors had migrated, although he pronounces his name “Fournett.” (The pronunciation of French proper names in Louisiana would make a good monograph. There is, for example, a state senator named DeBlieux who is called simply “W.”) I had gone to the Chief Justice to talk politics, but somehow he had got around to telling me instead about the night of September 8, 1935, which has the same significance among Longites that St. Bartholomew’s Day has for French Protestants.
Huey had come down from Washington, where he was serving as United States Senator, to run a special session of the Louisiana Legislature, Justice Fournet said. He controlled the state from Washington through a caretaker Governor named O. K. Allen, but whenever there was a bit of political hocus-pocus to be brought off that he thought was beyond Allen’s limited competence, he would come home to put the legislators through their hoops himself. When Huey was in Baton Rouge, everybody called him Governor. Since he feared assassination, he had had a flat furnished for him on the thirty-fourth floor of the Capitol, and theoretically he would retire to it at the end of each legislative day, but, Fournet said, “he was the kind of man who was always running around, so they couldn’t keep him in that apartment. He was a hard man to guard.” Fournet himself had served as Speaker of the House—it was he who adjourned the legislature when Huey’s enemies were about to impeach him—and, after that, as Lieutenant Governor under Allen. Huey had later looked after his old friend by pushing his election as an Associate Justice of the State Supreme Court. The Court was in the front line of conflict, because, as the Chief Justice explained to me, “There was hardly a piece of legislation that Huey introduced that the other side didn’t carry to litigation. Huey had what he called a ‘deeduct’ system—ten per cent of the salary of every state employee for his political fund. It sounds raw, but he had to take the money where he could; the other side had all the money of Standard Oil to pay its attorneys. I was elected for a term of fourteen years, and on the day I took the oath of office I had to start thinking about my campaign for reëlection.” On September 8, 1935, the Chief Justice said, he had had to see Huey personally about some friends who needed political help, so he drove up to Baton Rouge from New Orleans, where the Supreme Court sits, and arrived at the Capitol just before nine at night, when the legislature was to recess. Here he offered a slight digression. “People from out of state sometimes ask me why the Supreme Court sits in New Orleans when the capital is Baton Rouge, only eighty miles away,” he said. “I tell them the truth—that there wasn’t a road you could count on until Huey got in office, so the busy lawyers of New Orleans would have spent half their lives travelling back and forth. Now you can make it in an hour and a half, thanks to Huey, but the Court has stayed in New Orleans, mostly from habit.
When Fournet reached the Capitol, Huey was in the House chamber, on the second floor, coördinating the efforts of his legislators, and Fournet walked in and took a seat. He had the Senator under his eye, but when the session broke, there were a number of people between them, and Huey started out the door so fast that Fournet couldn’t get to him. “That man never walked,” he told me. Huey headed toward the corridor in the rear of the building that led to Governor Allen’s office, and Fournet followed, content to catch Huey when he came out after leaving a few instructions with the titular Governor of Louisiana. There were bodyguards in platoon strength in front of the Senator and behind him as he walked. Entering the corridor, Fournet saw a couple of rich dilettante politicians who were always good for a campaign contribution. He stopped to talk to them and then went on. Huey had disappeared into Allen’s office. Fournet, as he followed him, passed two or three men standing in a recess in the wall, talking. He paid them no heed, assuming that they had just emerged from the House chamber, as he had. Then Huey came out of Allen’s door, turning, with the knob still in his hand, to shout an inquiry back into the room. Fournet heard the answer: “All of them have been notified, Governor.” He started toward Huey, and as he did, a young man came up on his right side and passed him, walking fast. What attracted the Justice’s attention was that he had a stubby black pistol in his right hand. “It was a hot night—before air-conditioning—and I perspire exceptionally,” Justice Fournet said. “So I was holding my panama hat in my right hand while I wiped my head with a handkerchief in my left. Without thinking, I hit at the man with my hat, backhand. But he reached Huey and fired, and Murphy Roden, a bodyguard, grabbed his gun hand and got a finger inside the trigger guard, else he would have killed Murphy. Huey spun around, made one whoop, and ran down the hall like a hit deer. Murphy and the young man went to the floor, both holding that gun and Murphy trying to reach his own gun with his other hand. I was leaning over them, thinking to grab hold, and Elias Coleman, another guard, leaned, too, and fired two bullets that passed, by the mercy of God, between Murphy and me and killed the fellow. He let go his gun and lay there. He had black hair, combed down a little slick, as I remember it, and black-rimmed eyeglasses. Huey ran clear to the end of the hall and down a flight of stairs. Then the other guards pulled the body over to the wall and emptied their guns into it. It sounded like machine guns.”
When Huey got to the lower hall, a couple of fellows he knew stopped him. One said “Are you hit?” and he said “Yes.” The other said “Are you hurt bad?” and Huey said “I don’t know.” They put him in their car and took him to the Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. There, the examining surgeon found that the bullet had perforated Huey’s colon and part of one kidney. “I couldn’t ride with Huey, because it was a two-seated car,” the Chief Justice said, “so I went to get mine, parked not far away, and by the time I saw him again he was on the examining table at the hospital. He felt strong and didn’t think he was going to die. ‘I want you to be more charitable toward Wade Martin and Ellender,’ he said.” (Martin was the chairman of the Public Service Commission, and Allen Ellender is now the senior United States Senator from Louisiana.) “He knew that all three of us wanted to be Governor, but he wanted us to get along together.” It reminded me of how an old friend of mine, Whitey Bimstein, described the death of Frankie Jerome, a boxer he was seconding in the Madison Square Garden ring. “He died in my arms, slipping punches,” Whitey said. Huey, mortally shot, talked politics.
Alone, except for the taxi-driver, in the rotunda of the Capitol, I thought I heard Huey make his one whoop, but the sound may have been a mere hallucination. In any case, I felt differently about Huey when I walked out into the heat. By that time, I had been in Louisiana about ten days, and I had also changed my mind about Earl Long, then Governor of the state. Earl is Huey’s brother, his junior by two years and his survivor by a quarter of a century, and although Fournet had said that Earl “wouldn’t make a patch on Huey’s pants,” it seemed to me that he was filling a pretty fair pair of country britches. I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula. Dispatches in the New York papers had left small doubt that he had gone off his rocker during the May session of the legislature, and I wanted to see what happens to a state when its chief executive is in that sort of fix. The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum. By late July, when I arrived in Louisiana, he had heaved himself back into power by arguing his way out of the Texas sanitarium, touching base at a New Orleans private hospital, and legalizing his way out of the Southeast Louisiana State Hospital, at Mandeville. Then he had departed on a long tour of recuperation at out-of-state Western race tracks that most of the lay public had never heard of before he hit them. Just after I disembarked from my plane in New Orleans, I read in the local Times-Picayune that the “ailing Governor” had got as far back toward home as Hot Springs, Arkansas, a resort famous for reconditioning old prizefighters and race horses. He had promised to be back in the state on August 1st, in time to begin stumping for renomination as Governor in the Democratic primary elections, four months away. “You know, I think ol’ Earl will just about do it again,” the taxi-driver said as we descended the Capitol’s forty-eight states. The place had started him thinking about the Longs. “It don’t set good how they done him like they done, y’unnerstand? Those doctors. And his wife. Saying he was crazy. It’ll be like the last time he run, in ’56. Two days before the primary, you couldn’t find nobody to say he was going to vote for him. Then they all voted for him. And two days later you couldn’t find nobody would admit to have voted that way.”
With the Governor unavailable, I sat down in New Orleans to await his return and meanwhile try to build up a frame of reference, as the boys in the quarterly magazines would say. Politics is to the conversation of Louisiana what horse racing is to England’s. In London, anybody from the Queen to a dustman will talk horses; in Louisiana, anyone from a society woman to a bellhop will talk politics. Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the Republic of Lebanon. The balance between the Catholics in southern Louisiana and the Protestants in northern Louisiana is as delicate as that between the Moslems and the Christians in Lebanon, and is respected by the same convention of balanced tickets. In Louisiana, there is a substantial Negro vote—about a hundred and fifty thousand—that no candidate can afford to discourage privately or to solicit publicly. In the sister Arab republic, Moslem and Christian candidates alike need the Druse vote, although whoever gets it is suspected of revolutionary designs. The grand gimmick of Louisiana politics, however, providing it with a central mechanism as fascinating as a roulette wheel, is the double-primary system for gubernatorial nominations. The first primary is open to anyone who can get up the registration fee of two hundred and ten dollars. This brings out as many entries as the Preakness or the Kentucky Derby. If any candidate has more than fifty per cent of the total votes, he wins the nomination, which means that he will automatically be elected, since Democratic nomination is a ticket to the Governor’s Mansion. If no one has a clear majority, the two top men have a runoff in a second primary, held about a month later. It is unusual for a candidate to win first time around, and if one does, he arouses a certain amount of resentment as a spoilsport. After the first primary, each beaten candidate and his backers trade off their support to one of the two men who are still alive, in exchange for what he will bind himself to do for them in the way of legislation, patronage, or simple commercial advantage. Naturally, the runoff candidate who looks more likely to win can buy support at lower political prices than the other fellow, but by trying to drive too hard a bargain he may send the business to the underdog. Many a man has beaten himself that way. A Louisiana politician can’t afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department. In the campaigning days before the first primary, topics of conversation are delightfully unlimited; the talkers guess at not only how many votes a candidate will get in the first primary but what he will trade them off for, and to whom, if he fails to make the second. It is like planning carom shots or four-horse parlays.
Last year, the date for the first Louisiana primary was December 5th, and in July conversation was already intense. The talk centered on Long and whether he would be able to get to the post. I found few people, even among Long’s worst friends, who believed that he was “crazy,” although there were some who said he had been at the time of his deportation. (This second position, however, was hard to defend in public discussion. “Crazy” and “not crazy,” like “guilty” and “not guilty,” are terms that, in popular usage, admit of no shading in between; being crazy or being not crazy is considered a permanent condition, like having one leg.) In New York, the stories of his conduct on his Western tour of convalescence may have seemed clear evidence that the old boy was mad—the phrenetic betting on horse races, the oddly assorted roadside purchases (forty-four cases of cantaloupes, seven hundred dollars’ worth of cowboy boots, and such), the endless nocturnal telephone calls, the quarrels with his friends and guards—but seen from New Orleans they indicated a return to normal. Earl had always been like that, fellows who knew him said. A summary of his physical condition had been released to the press by the physicians who examined him after his discharge from the State Hospital at Mandeville on June 26th. The doctors’ workup on the Governor looked dreadful to a layman—bum ticker, series of cerebral accidents, hardening of the arteries, and a not otherwise described condition called bronchiectasis. But there were lay experts who said that it was all a fake—that no doctor had been able to lay a hand on Earl to examine him. A Louisiana political tipster never expresses a reservation, and when politics extends over into the field of pathology, the positiveness extends with it. “I know a fella that Earl carries with him all the time, hear?, and he says Earl just playing mousy, y’unnerstand?” summed up one extreme position. The opposing view could be summarized as “I know a fella told me they gave him adrenalin right in his heart, hear?, and that means the old alligator is in extremis, y’unnerstand?” On my first evening in New Orleans, I received forty-two other prognoses in between.
Nor was there any agreement on the efficacy of the device whereby Earl, in entering the primaries, was challenging the Louisiana constitution, which provides that a Governor may not succeed himself directly. Earl, bowing to this law, had dropped out after his 1948-52 term, and then had returned in 1956. Now, however, he was raising the point that if he resigned before election—the formal, post-primary election, that is—his Lieutenant Governor would become Governor, and so he, coming in to begin a new term, would be succeeding not himself but the fellow who had succeeded him. Even Huey had not thought of that one. What I heard from Long men was that it was the way the law read that counted, hear?, and not what the framers had wanted it to signify. From the other side I heard that there wasn’t a court in the country but would hold against a little fine-print loophole, and, yeah, you resigned, but, yeah, you can’t get away with that. Another point in dispute was how near the Governor stood to federal prison. The income-tax people were reportedly on his trail, and apparently they were not being as hermetically secretive as they are supposed to be, or else the Natty Bumppos stalking Earl had stepped on a couple of dry twigs. The range of the opinion on this point lay between “They got it on him this time, hear” and “Uncle Earl is just too smart to get caught so easy. Whatever he got, he’ll say it was campaign contributions, same as Nixon in ’52. That’s why he’s got to keep on campaigning, y’unnerstand?” (There is no statutory limit on campaign contributions in the State of Louisiana, and Earl Long has often said, like Brother Huey before him, that he is campaigning all the time.) Arranged in capsule form, all the areas of disagreement about the Governor, peacefully soaking his hide in the Arkansas vats, came to this: The perfect sour-on-Long man held that he was likely to die before the primaries, sure to get licked if he survived, certain to be thrown out by the state Supreme Court if nominated, and bound to be in jail before he could be inaugurated. The perfect Long man expressed faith that the Governor was as full of fight as a man twenty years younger, that he would probably win the first primary with seventy per cent of the vote, that he had the Louisiana Supreme Court in his pocket, and that if campaign contributions weren’t income for a Republican like Nixon, they weren’t income for a Democrat like Uncle Earl.
On my first night in town, before I had finished my third Sazerac at the little bar in Arnaud’s Restaurant while waiting for a table, I was not only indoctrinated but willing to bet. An outsider, I had no feedbox information and less idea of the form, but I had an analogy, and nothing can seem more impressive to a man drinking on an empty stomach.
“When Pat McCarran was seventy-one,” I said to the pair of home experts with me, “he had a heart attack so bad that they were laying eight to one against him in the Nevada Turf Club, but he recovered and lived seven years to ruin every politician who hopped off him when he was sick. He was tough. How old is Uncle Earl?
“Sixty-three,” said one expert.
“Is he tough?”
“Tough as hell,” said the other.
“You see?” I said. “It’s a lock.” It was an insight that wouldn’t have come to me if Arnaud’s had not been doing such a good business, but we got a table just in time to prevent my laying money.
When we had ordered moderately—crabmeat Arnaud, filet mignon marchand de vin, and a bottle of Smith-Haut-Lafitte ’47—we got back to politics. One of my convives, a lawyer, said that the Governor had deep pockets lined with fishhooks: “When you’re with him and he picks up a newspaper, you lay down the nickel.” The other man, a newspaperman and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard named Tom Sancton, whom I had known for some time, maintained that old Earl wasn’t so bad. “He gives money to every kid he meets,” he said. “ ‘A quarter to whites and a nickel to niggers’ is the way you hear it around here.” The “nickel to niggers” is a key to the Long family’s position on the Southern issue. “They do not favor the Negro,” a Negro educator once told me, “but they are less inflexibly antagonistic than the others.”
“Earl is like Huey on Negroes,” Tom said. “When the new Charity Hospital was built here, some Negro politicians came to Huey and said it was a shame there were no Negro nurses, when more than half the patients were colored. Huey said he’d fix it for them, but they wouldn’t like his method. He went around to visit the hospital and pretended to be surprised when he found white nurses waiting on colored men. He blew high as a buzzard can fly, saying it wasn’t fit for white women to be so humiliated. It was the most racist talk you ever heard, but the result was he got the white nurses out and the colored nurses in, and they’ve had the jobs ever since.”
Since the Governor was not available in the flesh, my friends took me after dinner to see and hear him on film. In the projection room of television station WDSU, which is off a handsome Creole courtyard in the French Quarter, they had arranged for a showing of a documentary composed of various television-newsreel shots, and from this encounter I date my acquaintance with Uncle Earl. The cameramen had covered all the great moments of that fulminating May session of the legislature, which began with the Governor riding high and ended, for him, when he was led from the floor, tired and incoherent, by Margaret Dixon, the managing editor of the Baton Rouge Advocate. A day later, he was under heavy sedation and on his way to Texas, where he arrived, he subsequently said, with “not enough clothes on me to cover a red bug, and a week later I was enjoying the same wardrobe.” But within a fortnight he had talked a Texas judge into letting him return to Louisiana on his promise to matriculate at a private hospital in New Orleans. After signing himself in and out of the New Orleans hospital, the Governor had started for Baton Rouge to assume power, only to be stopped by sheriff’s deputies at the behest of his wife, Miz Blanche, who had then committed him to the State Hospital at Mandeville. Thence he had been rescued by a faithful retainer, the lawyer Joe Arthur Sims, who sought a writ of habeas corpus. Once the Governor had regained temporary liberty, he completed the job by firing the director of the Department of Hospitals and the superintendent of the hospital, who, in the normal course of events, might have appeared against him to contend that he was insane.
In the opening newsreel shots, Long appeared a full-faced, portly, peppery, white-haired man, as full of hubris as a dog is of ticks in spring, sallying out on the floor of the legislature to wrest the microphone from the hands of opposition speakers. “Let him talk, Governor, let him talk,” a man in the foreground of the picture—perhaps the Speaker—kept saying during these episodes, but the Governor never would. He would shake his finger in his subjects’ faces, or grab the lectern with both hands and wag his bottom from side to side. He interrupted one astonished fellow to ask, “What’s your name?”
“John Waggoner, from Plain Dealing.” (This is the name of a town.)
“Well, well, you look like a fine man. Don’t let nothing run over you.”
Some of the newsreel clips were of the Governor’s press conferences, and in one, when a reporter asked him whether he thought he could manage his legislators, he said, “You know, the Bible says that before the end of time billy goats, tigers, rabbits, and house cats all are going to sleep together. My gang looks like the Biblical proposition is here.” This was the first good sample of his prose I had had a chance to evaluate, and I immediately put him on a level with my idol Colonel John R. Stingo, the Honest Rainmaker, who, at the age of eighty-five, is selling lots at Massena, New York, a community that he predicts will be the Pittsburgh of the future. The newsreel also included a sequence in which the Governor sounded off on Mayor deLesseps S. Morrison, of New Orleans, who for years had been his rival in Democratic primaries. “I hate to say this—I hate to boost old Dellasoups—but he’ll be second again.” (Long beat Morrison badly in the 1956 race for Governor. He always referred to him as “Dellasoups,” and represented him as a city slicker.) “I’d rather beat Morrison than eat any blackberry, huckleberry pie my mama ever made. Oh, how I’m praying for that stump-wormer to get in there. I want him to roll up them cuffs, and get out that little old tuppy, and pull down them shades, and make himself up. He’s the easiest man to make a nut out of I’ve ever seen in my life.” The “tuppy,” for “toupee,” was a slur on Morrison’s hair, which is thinning, though only Long has ever accused him of wearing a wig. As for the makeup, Morrison occasionally used it for television. Earl’s Morrison bit was a standard feature of his repertoire, and I could see from the mobile old face how he enjoyed it. And, as if to illustrate the old Long vote-getting method, which had worked in Louisiana ever since Huey took the stump in 1924, the newsreel anthologist had included part of a speech of the Governor’s, evidently favoring a higher license fee for heavy (rich men’s) vehicles: “Don’t you think the people that use the roads ought to pay for building them? Take a man out in the country, on an old-age pension. He don’t own an automobile, can’t even drive one—do you think he should pay for highways for overloaded trucks that tear up the highway faster than you can build them? We got a coffee-ground formation in south Louisiana—it costs three times more to build a road in south Louisiana than it does in west Texas—but still the Picayune says they don’t know, they can’t understand. Well, there’s a hell of a lot that they don’t understand—that they do understand but they don’t want you to understand. And you can say this, as long as I’ve got the breath and the life and the health, I’ve got the fortitude and the backbone to tell ’em, and dammit they know I’ll tell ’em, and that’s why they’re against me. You can only judge the future by the past.”
Almost all the elements of the Long appeal are there, starting with the pensions, which Huey conceived and sponsored, and on which a high proportion of the elderly people in Louisiana live—seventy-two dollars a month now, a fine sum in a low-income state. “But still the Picayune says they don’t know, they can’t understand” refers to the good roads whose high price the Times-Picayune constantly carps at, because, the Longs always imply, the Picayune, organ of the czarists, secretly wants bad roads. “They know I’ll tell them, and that’s why they’re against me” means that the press—a monopoly press in New Orleans now—has always been against the Longs, the champions of the poor; when all the press consistently opposes one skillful man, he can turn its opposition into a backhanded testimony to his unique virtue. “You can only judge the future by the past” is a reminder that the past in Louisiana, before Huey, was painful for the small farmers in the northern hills and the southern bayous. It is not hard to select such an all-inclusive passage from a Long speech; they recur constantly, the mixture as before.
Then followed clips showing the crucial scrimmages on the floor of the legislature. In the beginning, I could see, the Governor was as confident as Oedipus Tyrannus before he got the bad news. He felt a giant among pygmies, a pike among crappies, as he stood there among the legislators, most of whom owed him for favors—special bills passed for their law clients, state jobs for constituents, “contributions” for their personal campaign funds, and so on. But that day the Governor was rushing in where the dinner-party liberals who represent Southern states in Washington have steadily refused to tread. Old Earl was out to liberalize the registration law, passed in Reconstruction times, that gives parish (i.e., county) registrars the power to disqualify voters arbitrarily on “educational” grounds. Except in a few rural parishes, the effect of this law has been on the decline for decades, but now a white-supremacy group in the legislature had moved for its strict enforcement—against colored voters, of course. It took me a minute or two to realize that the old “demagogue” was actually making a civil-rights speech. “Now, this registration you’re talking about,” he said. “That was put through in carpetbag days, when colored people and scalawags were running rampant in our country. You got to interpret the Constitution. There ain’t ten people looking at me, including myself, who, if properly approached or attacked, could properly qualify to vote. They say this a nigger bill—ain’t no such.” (The old law, if enforced impartially, would also have disqualified a number—large but hard to estimate—of older white men and women who had been on the rolls since they were twenty-one but were not Ph.Ds. Needless to say, the bill’s proponents did not expect enforcement to be impartial.)
At this point, the camera focussed on a young man with slick black hair and a long upper lip who was wearing a broad necktie emblazoned with a Confederate flag and who addressed the microphone with gestures appropriate to mass meetings. “It’s Willie Rainach, the Citizens Council boy,” one of my mentors told me. Rainach, who is a state senator from Summerfield, in Claiborne Parish, pleaded with his colleagues not to let Long “sell Louisiana down the river.” (I felt another concept crumbling; I had always thought it was Negroes who got sold down rivers.) Long, grabbing for a microphone—probably he had no legal right to be in the argument at all—remonstrated, “I think there’s such a thing as being overeducated. Scientists tell me there’s enough wrinkles up there”—tapping his head—“to take care of all kinds of stuff. Maybe I’m getting old—I’m losing some of mine. I hope that don’t happen to Rainach. After all this over, he’ll probably go up there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at the moon, and get close to God.” This was gross comedy, a piece of miming that recalled Jimmy Savo impersonating the Mississippi River. Then the old man, changing pace, shouted in Rainach’s direction, “And when you do, you got to _rec_ognize that niggers is human beings!”
It was at this point that the legislators must have decided he’d gone off his crumpet. Old Earl, a Southern politician, was taking the Fourteenth Amendment’s position that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States . . . nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So sporadic was my interest in Southern matters then that I did not know the federal Department of Justice had already taken action against Washington Parish, over near the Mississippi line, because the exponents of the law that Earl didn’t like had scratched the names of 1,377 Negro voters, out of a total of 1,510, from the rolls. (When, in January, 1960, six months later, United States District Judge J. Skelly Wright, a Louisianian, ordered the Negroes’ names put back on the rolls, no dispatch clapped old Earl on the back for having championed them. Nor, in February, when Louisiana appealed Judge Wright’s decision and the Supreme Court sustained it, did anybody give the old battler credit for having battled. The main feature of the civil-rights bill passed by this Congress was, in fact, an affirmation of the Earl Long argument that led to his sojourn in Texas, but nobody recalled the trouble that his fight for civil rights had cost him.)
“There’s no longer slavery!” Long shouted at Rainach. “There wasn’t but two people in Winn Parish that was able to own slaves—one was my grandpa, the other was my uncle—and when they were freed, they stayed on” (here his voice went tenor and sentimental, then dropped again) “and two of those fine old colored women more or less died in my Christian mother’s arms—Black Alice and Aunt Rose.” He sounded like a blend of David Warfield and Morton Downey. “To keep fine, honorable, gray-headed men and women off the registration rolls, some of whom have been voting as much as sixty or sixty-five years—I plead with you in all candor. I’m a candidate for Governor. If it hurts me, it will just have to hurt.” He didn’t believe it would hurt, but it did. In any case, he was taking a chance, which put him in a class by himself among Southern public men.
This was the high point of the Governor’s performance, an Elizabethan juxtaposition of comedy and pathos; weeks after witnessing it, I could still visualize Senator Rainach up on his porch in Summerfield, looking at the moon, foot in hand, and feeling integrated with his Creator. As the session continued, the old man, blundering into opposition he hadn’t expected, became bitter and sometimes hardly coherent. The others snarled him down, and Mrs. Dixon led him from the floor.
The light in the projection room went on, as if at the end of a first act, and there was a pause while the operator loaded a new reel. When the show went on again, I saw a shocking change. The Governor, between his exit from the screen and his reappearance, had made the tortuous journey to Texas and back. Extended on a pallet in a dusty little hotel at Covington, where he lay after winning his way to freedom by firing the hospital officials, he made me think of old newsreel shots of Mahatma Gandhi. His pale, emaciated arms and chest were showing over the top of a sheet that covered the rest of his body, and he addressed the reporters in a hoarse whisper that was hard to understand because he had mislaid his dentures. It was the beginning of the second chapter of the legend of Long-family martyrdom. “I’m very happy to be relieved from hijacking, kidnapping, punctures, needles, and everything they could use,” he said, “and one of the first things I’m going to do is see that no person, colored or white or what, has to go through the same humiliation, the same intimidation, the same hurts and bruises that I did.”
The next sequence was pastoral—on the veranda of Earl’s old-fashioned farm at Winnfield, in his home parish, where it is politically inadvisable to paint the house too often. The horrors of Texas and Mandeville were beginning to recede. “Now I’m at my little ol’ pea-patch farm in Winnfield, where I raise some billy goats, shoats, cows, got two or three old plug horses, but they suit me,” he said. “I knew I was a little run down in the legislature. Only two weeks to go, and I knew there was lots of important things that would fall if I wasn’t there. When they kidnapped me, I lost the loan-shark bill.” This was a bill to regulate rates of interest charged by small-loan companies, and the Governor’s tone made me tremble for the small debtors of Louisiana, left naked to the exactions of the Shylocks.
The respite at Winnfield was brief, however—just a couple of days, while he prepared for a few nonpolitical, pre-campaign stump speeches. The screen showed one of these stump appearances, too. The Governor was weak, and had to be helped up some wooden steps set against the side of the flat-bodied truck from which he spoke. The sun, to judge from the sweaty faces of the crowd, must have been killing. He didn’t say much; the main purpose of his appearances was to show the voters that Lazarus was in business at the old stand. Joe Arthur Sims, his disciple-at-law, made the principal speech. Mr. Sims is a big young man, about six feet four, with a big face windowed in tortoise shell, a big chin, and a big voice. His delivery is based on increasing volume, like the noise of an approaching subway train; when he reaches his climaxes, you feel almost irresistibly impelled to throw yourself flat between the rails and let the cars pass over you. “When our beloved friend, the fine Governor of the Gret Stet of Loosiana, sent for me in his need at Mandeville,” Mr. Sims said, “his condition had been so MISREPRESENTED”—here he took the train around a loop and up to Seventy-second Street before he started down again—“that people I knew said to me, ‘Don’t you go up there, Joe Sims. That man is a hyena. He’ll BITe you in the laig.’ But I went. I went to Mandeville, and before I could reach my friend, the armed guard had to open ten locked doors, and lock each one of ’em again after us. And theah, theah, I found the FINE Governor, of the GRET Stet of Loosiana”—and here his shocked voice backed up way beyond Columbus Circle—“without SHOES, without a stitch of CLOTHES to put awn him, without a friend to counsel with. And he was just as rational as he has ever been in his life, or as you see him here today. He said, ‘JOE SIMS, WHERE THE HELL you BEEN?’ ”
When Tom and the lawyer and I left the projection room, I felt that I had been introduced into a new world, and it gave me something to think about as we moved from cool WDSU through the wet heat toward Pete Herman’s bar. The transitions between conditioned and unconditioned air are the new pattern of life in the summer South. This was a pilgrimage. Herman (his name in the prize ring), who has been blind for thirty-seven years, was the best infighter I have ever seen in my life, and I had to tell him so. (As I age, I grow more punctilious about my aesthetic debts.) I had watched him fight fifteen rounds against Midget Smith at the old Madison Square Garden during my college holidays in December of 1921. They were bantamweights—a hundred and eighteen pounds. Herman was already nearly blind, although he was not saying so. He fought by a system of feint and touch. Until he could make contact, he would move his head to draw Smith’s punches to where he did not mean to be, and then, as soon as he felt a glove or an arm or a passing current of air, he knew where he was. If he had his glove on a man’s right biceps, he knew where the man’s left hand and belly and chin must be, as a touch typist knows where the letters are on the keyboard. He could anticipate moves, and lead and counter and put his combinations of blows together at a range of inches; I have heard it said that he could feint, and fool you, with both hands out of sight. At the Garden, I could see the beauty of what he was doing, but I couldn’t understand why, when he hurt Smith, he didn’t follow him up. And until he had established touch again, Herman was lost; Smith, a tough little slugger, caught him with some savage blows that Herman—inexplicably then—failed to see, although they were a long way coming. Smith got the decision, but I thought it unjust, and until Herman’s manager announced his retirement because of blindness, I lacked the key to what I had witnessed. In the thirty-seven years since, I have never seen such a performance. “What Pete Herman done,” an initiate once told me, with awe, “nobody could have learned him.” My New Orleans companions, both of whom were children when Herman was fighting, could not fathom my compulsion to see him; they probably thought he was like what you see on television. To them he was only a hard little Italian named Gulotta, whose late brother, Gaspar, had been the official collector of the contributions to police and politicians that kept the sucker traps in the Quarter operating.
Pete’s joint was a bar that had a back room with a floor show. The show was on when we arrived. There were only a couple of people in the bar, but the back room was packed. A Negro, who the master of ceremonies said was named Pork Chops, was dancing desultorily, and he and the m.c. were carrying on a dialogue:
With this, everybody except us got up and left, in a disciplined, joyless group. I hadn’t thought the joke was that bad, and I was almost glad the proprietor was blind, because otherwise the exodus might have hurt his feelings. But then I learned that such mass entrances and departures are routine, like the alternations of being too hot or too cold. The migrating audiences are tourists from Iowa, who sign up for rounds of the night clubs at their hotels and are carried from one joint to the next in buses. The deal apparently includes one soft drink at each stop.
When the sightseers had gone, we sent for the proprietor, who came over to us, walking briskly and only once or twice checking his course by touching a table. He has a big head and a welterweight’s shoulders and thorax on short legs—a jockey’s build. I told him I had seen him fight Midget Smith. “And I still think you should have had the decision,” I said.
“I thought I win, too,” he agreed. “I could see Smith was cut up bad.” I assumed that his manager had told him Smith was cut up bad. Then he said happily, “Barney Ross was in here a couple of weeks ago with a fighter he’s handling. Barney’s thirteen years younger than me, and he looks older. He’s gone all gray on top.” Then I understood that he visualizes what people tell him, and that a minute later it’s all a part of his past, as if he’d seen it himself. Pretty soon, he excused himself and went about his business, as a good saloonkeeper should. When he was gone, we had a round of beer and began talking about the Governor again.
“Don’t let him con you,” the lawyer said. “You hoid him talk about, yeah, Black Alice, and, yeah, Aunt Rose, but all he cares about is Uncle Oil.” There is a New Orleans city accent (which I shall make no further attempt to reproduce) associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans, between the eighteen-forties and the Civil War. Irish immigrants, not Negro slaves, built the levees; the Negroes, bought at high prices to work cotton, were mostly too valuable to use on low-pay labor. “Earl doesn’t care about the jigs,” the lawyer went on. “He wants their votes. And he knows he’ll get them if he can just make those other fellows keep their hands off the lists They’re just fakers anyway. They don’t want to disfranchise all niggers—only his niggers. When they’ve got a nigger they can be sure of, they’ll vote him every time. Uncle Earl makes sweet talk about keeping those old white people on the lists, too. He knows that any man or woman old enough to draw a pension will vote for a Long every time. And that loan-shark bill he talks about—hell, he just doesn’t want to let that small-loan business out from under his thumb. It’s too rich a source of revenue. The small-loan companies are licensed to lend sums up to a thousand now. The bill would have limited the interest on loans of under a thousand to three and a half per cent a month—that’s forty-two per cent a year. But it would have given them the right to make loans of more than a thousand dollars at true loan-shark rates. The loan business of over a thousand is reserved for the banks now. So Earl’s loan-shark bill would have helped the sharks more than it hurt them. I’ll bet the sharks were for it, and the banks put up the money to fight it.”
I said I couldn’t understand the importance of the small-loan firms to a politician. We have them in New York, but they are not considered important sources of graft.
“It’s because to get a license for a small-loan company you have to get a special bill passed through the legislature and signed by the Governor,” the lawyer explained impatiently. “One Shylock, one bill. It’s the surest way in the world to get rich. So a man wants a small-loan license, he goes to a politician from his home parish and gives him ten thousand dollars to take up to Baton Rouge. The fellow steers it through—he gives so much here and so much there, and maybe a good campaign contribution to whoever’s Governor for signing. And what’s left sticks to him for his trouble. There’ve been seventy-two special small-loan bills passed and signed in the last couple of sessions. So now comes a bill to change the statute itself—you can imagine the number of jackpots there are to be split up. What makes Uncle Earl sore is that they run him off to Texas before he could get into the act. He wants his leaders to be like those trained dogs you used to see in vaudeville—the ones that hold a pose until the trainer tells them to come and get their piece of meat.”
“Earl likes to cut them down to size before they get too big and fresh,” Tom Sancton said. “You heard what he did to the fellow from Alexandria who got a big retainer from the theatre owners to try to remove a two-per-cent tax on movie admissions? The fellow went to see Earl before the last campaign and came back and told his clients that it was in the bag. Then he went out and worked like a dog for Earl—speaking on television and radio, and stumping and conspiring and kissing babies and hustling votes—until Earl was elected Governor. One of the first things Earl did in the new legislature was to oppose removal of the tax. The fellow from Alexandria went to see him—he was afraid he would have to refund his fee, or the theatre owners would shoot him—and he said, ‘I told my clients that you said you wanted their support and that you wouldn’t block removal of the tax. What do I tell them now? ’ You know what old Earl said? He said, ‘I’ll tell you what to tell them. Tell them I lied.’ ”
“Why did he do that?” I asked. “Did somebody induce him to keep the tax on the movies?”
“Hell, no,” said Tom. “He just didn’t want the other fellow’s clients to think the other fellow was that strong. He likes them to come straight to Uncle Earl.”
“Oh, there’s lots of ways of making money here,” the lawyer said. “For instance, a law says that all state property must be insured at a rate set by a committee known as the Louisiana Insurance Rating and Fire Agency. That does away with competitive bidding, so placing insurance is just a matter of dealer’s choice. The Federal Housing Authority has found that on public housing, built partly with federal and partly with state funds, the insurance rate here is the highest in the nation. And then there’s the tax payable to the state on sulphur taken from the ground. It’s set ridiculously low—twenty cents a ton—by a provision of the state constitution. There isn’t a session of the legislature that somebody doesn’t introduce a sulphur bill to amend the constitution. It’s always beaten—but just. How much does it cost the sulphur companies to keep that twenty-cent limit on the books?”
“But old Earl is tight with his money,” Sancton said. “The one thing he’s never been tight about is horse betting. He can’t stop. When he gets the papers in the morning, he tears them open and goes straight to the hog quotations and the racing charts. After that, he gets a batch of Daily Racing Forms and Morning Telegraphs and lays out the entries and past performances at every track going—side by side, on a long table. It’s too much trouble to use one paper and turn the pages. Then he goes to work with a red pencil and a blue one, and in an hour or so he begins calling up touts on long distance—Picklenosed Willie and The Owl and Stableboy and fellows like that. Next, he starts calling bookies to place his bets—a few dollars on each of three horses in practically every race in the country, unless one of the touts has given him something hot, and then he lays it in. If he’s betting a book in Louisiana and he loses, he’s been known to put it on the tab, but if he wins, he sometimes has a state trooper over at the joint within a half hour to collect.”
This was the life I had always wanted to live, and I had a great fellow-feeling for Uncle Earl as the lawyer took up the refrain.
“After he makes his bets, the day’s business can begin,” the lawyer said. “First item is to turn to the supermarket ads. If he sees something in the ads that the price is right, he buys it regardless if he needs it at the moment or not. Like the morning he saw that Schwegmann’s was selling potatoes for forty-nine cents a ten-pound sack. Schwegmann’s is a string of three big supermarkets here that sell everything—furniture, automobile parts, grits, steak. Earl was a couple of days out of the State Hospital, and was staying here at the Roosevelt Hotel with ten state policemen, and there were a dozen politicians paying their respects. Earl says, ‘Come on, boys, I can’t afford to pass that up,’ and he goes downstairs and gets into his eleven-thousand-dollar air-conditioned official Cadillac that he says he got for eighty-five hundred because he is always protecting the interests of the fine people of the Great State of Louisiana, and the state troopers get out in front on motorcycles to clear the way, and he sits in front, next to the chauffeur, the way he always does, and packs those politicians in the back, and they take off. They pull up in front of Schwegmann’s—all the sirens blowing, frightening hell out of the other shoppers—and Earl gets out and heads straight for the vegetable department, and, yeah, there are the potato sacks, but they’re marked fifty cents instead of forty-nine. Earl calls for the store manager and accuses him of misleading advertising, and shows him the ad, and the manager calls over all the clerks he can spare, and they change the price on the bags from fifty cents to forty-nine. That satisfies Earl, so he buys a hundred pounds of the potatoes and tells a state senator to pick them up and carry them to the car, and then he sees some alarm clocks on sale, and buys three hundred dollars’ worth, and tells some representatives from upcountry to carry them. And eighty-seven dozen goldfish in individual plastic bags of water, and two cases of that sweet Mogen David wine, and he tells the new superintendent of state police to load up. By the time they come out, it looks like a safari, with all them politicians as native bearers He must have had five thousand dollars’ worth of junk.”
“What did he think he was going to do with the stuff?” I asked.
“Damned if I know,” the lawyer said. “It’s just one of his ideas of pleasure. Well, when they get out there on the sidewalk, under about a hundred degrees of heat, the stuff won’t all go in the trunk of the Cadillac. At least, the trunk won’t close. So Uncle Earl sends a couple of senators and a judge into the store again to buy some rope, and they can’t find any but the gold kind that women use to tie back drapes with, so they buy about a furlong of that, and then when they get outside, the Cadillac is so low-slung they can’t pass the rope under the car. By that time, Uncle Earl is sitting in his air-cooled seat eating watermelon with salt, and he orders the chauffeur to get out and tell the judge to lie down under the car and get the rope around the best he can. The judge gets down on his knees, and as he does, he says, ‘I wonder what the governors of the forty-nine other states are doing right this minute.’ ”
Louisianians often tell this story, and they never fail to laugh at it. It could be the subject of a Daumier lithograph, and they have a Daumier sense of humor.
“And who are the candidates who are going to run against Uncle Earl?” I asked, almost as an afterthought. All the conversation I had heard that evening sounded as if Uncle Earl were running against hardened arteries, cerebral accidents, his wife, exhaustion, and the investigative branch of the Internal Revenue Service.
“Well,” Sancton said, “there’s Chep Morrison, the Mayor of New Orleans—he’s the one Uncle Earl calls Dellasoups. He’s a brisk, nice-looking fellow, and his boosters say he gets things done, but he has two strikes against him out of town—he’s a Catholic and he’s a New Orleans man. As Mayor of New Orleans, he’s made himself an international figure, touring South America and Europe to get business for the port, and he’s improved the city physically, but the kind of Mayor who looks right taking Zsa Zsa Gabor to tea looks all wrong to those rednecks up in the hill parishes. Being a Catholic doesn’t hurt him downstate—our Cajuns are Catholics, too, of course—but being from New Orleans does hurt. And even in the city he beat Uncle Earl by only twenty-two hundred votes in 1956. Of course, if Earl was out, Chep would carry the city big, and he’d get all the Negro vote; Earl gets about two-thirds of it now, and Chep the rest. And he’d get the organized-labor vote, too—but only if Earl was out. He could have been Mayor for life, but in 1952 the legislature passed a law that no Mayor of New Orleans could succeed himself more than once. Chep backed the new law, and maybe he wishes now he hadn’t, like the Republicans who pushed the no-third-term amendment for President.
“Then there’s Bill Dodd, the state comptroller. Big Bad Bill Dodd, Uncle Earl calls him. Dodd is an old Long man. He was Lieutenant Governor with Earl from 1948 to 1952, and ran for comptroller on the same ticket with him in 1956, but they’re enemies now. With Earl out, he’d get most of the steady Long vote. And there’s Willie Rainach, the racist, but he won’t get anybody but his own kind. The race issue isn’t as hot in Louisiana as it is in Arkansas or Alabama or Mississippi. Nobody will say he’s for integration in the schools, but as for letting Negroes vote or not vote, most people are for leaving things as they are—a kind of local option. Morrison and old Uncle Earl might lose some votes by being what people call a little ‘soft on the niggers,’ but those people wouldn’t necessarily all go to Rainach—many would go to somebody in between.”
“That’s why a lot of people think Jimmie Davis is the best bet,” the lawyer broke in. “Jimmie is a psalm-singing fellow from up in Shreveport, in the northwest corner of the state. He used to be a hillbilly singer and composer—he wrote ‘You Are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine’—and he was Governor from 1944 to 1948. He isn’t a clown; he’s smart. Lately he’s been making a lot of religious records. That helps him with the church people, and when he was Governor he didn’t have any trouble with the gamblers, either. His motto is ‘I Never Done Nobody No Harm.’ Davis is a country boy from a big city, but Shreveport doesn’t frighten the rubes the way New Orleans does. If he could get into the second primary with either Earl or Chep, he might inherit the votes of all the candidates who lost out.”
The one political element that neither of my mentors mentioned even once—nor did they need to—was the Republican Party. It is the smallest of all the political sects in Louisiana. In the statewide primaries of 1956, there were seven hundred and forty thousand Democratic voters and eighteen hundred and eighty-three Republican voters. There are no Republican watchers at most polling places on primary day, because there aren’t enough Republicans to go around. Of the eighteen hundred and eighty-three Republicans, it is my impression that eighteen hundred and eighty-two are lawyers, and during a Republican administration in Washington at least three quarters of them have federal jobs. Aspirants to the order have to be of sober demeanor and sterling character, to live down the ripe odor left by the “Customhouse” Republican regime of Reconstruction days, so called because President Grant’s brother-in-law, James F. Casey, was Collector of Customs for New Orleans. Known as the party of plunder when they were turned out in 1876, the Republicans have become the party of purity in state affairs. Louisiana Republicans must also have better than average education, because of the high incidence of office they must cope with when the wind off the Potomac is favorable. Barring protracted accidents like Roosevelt-Truman, a Louisiana Republican has three hundred and ninety-eight times the chances of a Louisiana Democrat to become a federal judge. Patience and self-denial are other necessary qualifications, since the novice renounces all hope of elective office when he takes the veil. His salvation can come only from outside the state, as Jupiter came to Danaë in a shower of gold. But it comes quite often. Since 1876, when Washington abandoned the Reconstruction, Republicans have held the White House and its appointive powers for forty-eight out of eighty-four years. I never learned the process of induction into the Louisiana Republican cult, but the ranks are always full, and the queue does not disperse when there are long waits between buses. Even during these spells of unemployment, the Republicans suffer no outrage. No Democrat in his right mind wants to incur the wrath of a man who will be a United States District Judge or a District Director of Internal Revenue the next time the Republicans win. Like the Parsees in India and the Mozabites in Algeria, they have won respect as clean, sober, and industrious people, and their attorneys get a full share of civil practice.
“And who is your man?” I asked my two mentors.
The lawyer, who had been knocking the Governor ever since I met him, said, as if there had never been any doubt of where he stood, “I’ll stay with Uncle Earl unless he looks too sick to go the distance. They may say, yeah, he’s crazy, and, yeah, he’s got deep pockets, and, yeah, he’d cut his best friend’s throat to keep him from getting elected, but how far do you think a man like me would have got in the Louisiana bar before Huey came along? Up from the bottom, ate my way free through college by playing football, studied law at night. Police-court cases. Any time I walked into court against one of those old-family boys from the big law firms that represented the banks and oil companies, I’d be dead.” The lawyer is a member of the Regular Democratic Organization, the New Orleans machine that is the spiritual equivalent of old-fashioned Tammany Hall. The Old Regulars, as they are known, fought Huey Long until he broke their power in the thirties, and then joined him. “Before Huey,” the lawyer went on, “the state was tight as a drum and crooked as a corkscrew; now it may still be crooked, but it’s open to everybody. Maybe some judges do cut up jackpots, but they aren’t working for a monopoly. In business it’s the same—there’s plenty of ex-wildcatters, oil-and-gas millionaires, who under the old house rules would have been crushed out before they got started. Huey was like the kid who comes along in a game of Chicago pool when all the balls are massed. He breaks them and runs a few, then misses and leaves the table full of shots for the other players. As long as the Longs are in, you have a chance.”
“You got to remember that Earl carries the blood of Huey the Martyr,” Sancton said. “He’s an Imam. People up North see Huey’s career from the wrong end. Here, a lot of voters remember him as the poor, friendless boy who stood up to the bully—the rich machine that had run Louisiana forever. He licked it. That put him in a favorable light. By the time the North’s attention was attracted to Huey, he was sitting on the bully’s chest. That made him look like the bully. The papers called for law and order, and when that fellow shot Huey in the Capitol, they said law and order had been vindicated.” To get a closer look at the urban wellsprings of the Long family’s power, Tom said, I should pay a visit to the Third Ward, and he suggested that sometime in the next couple of days we should drop in on Jim Comiskey, the ward leader and the chief of the Old Regulars. I said I was all for it.
That Wednesday evening, Tom picked me up at my hotel and drove me down to Comiskey’s demesne. On the way, he explained that the Old Regulars had combined with Earl to bring about Morrison’s downfall in the 1956 gubernatorial primary. They had held the Mayor nearly even in Orleans Parish, which is the city, and Earl had beaten him badly upstate and downstate. Consequently, while Morrison kept the municipal patronage out of the Old Regulars’ hands by setting up a young-Turk organization called the Crescent City Democratic Club, the Old Regulars did well on the state patronage that Earl fed them. Jim Comiskey’s sole public office was Assessor of Taxes for the Eighth District of New Orleans, which includes most of the big buildings. He told the property owners what they had to pay. “The Old Regulars can’t go with Morrison,” Sancton said. “They’ve got to go with somebody from upstate. Before Earl blew his top in the legislature, they were sitting pretty; all they had to do was stick with Earl and move in again. Now they don’t know whether they’ve got a candidate.” We were driving through ghostly streets of out-at-elbow one- and two-story white clapboard houses, the obscurity broken only by the bright signs of an occasional fried-chicken shack or one-story saloon. There were no lacy wrought-iron balconies and no scent of magnolias here. It was like a cross between Paterson, New Jersey, and Port-au-Prince. “Jim Comiskey and his brother Larry are tremendous wholesale liquor dealers,” my friend said. “Each Wednesday night, Jim shows up at the ward clubhouse, and everybody in the ward with any troubles comes to see him.”
The Third Ward clubhouse was a one-story clapboard building with a store front. Inside, there was a web of junk around the walls—ladders, lathes, Coke bottles, paint cans, ruptured Venetian blinds, tangles of electric wires, a water cooler. Down the middle of the room were two sections of undertaker’s chairs, one block occupied by a score or so of dejected white men and the other by a lone Negro. At the front of the room were an iron stove and an ancient golden-oak writing desk, and behind the desk sat Mr. Comiskey, a tall, pink-faced, blue-eyed, white-haired man, benevolent of expression and dressed in sober but costly black shantung. After Comiskey had disposed of the petitioner who was at his desk when we entered—a limpy man carrying an old straw hat—Sancton and I approached the seat of power. Tom, who knew the ward leader, introduced me. He said that I was a New Yorker interested in Louisiana politics, and that, as such, I couldn’t afford to pass up the leader of the Old Regulars. Mr. Comiskey clasped my hand and looked into my eyes with two of honest blue. He called for chairs for us, and we sat down, like visitors to a class in session. “They’ll all have their turn,” said the Assessor, with a wave of his hand toward the clients. “Everybody in the ward that has any trouble is here, and if they don’t be here, they should be here. And anybody in Noo Wawlins is welcome. They all have somebody that they want to get into a hospital, or a job working for the Levee Board, or things of that nature and so forth. When I hear what they want, if it can be done, I process it to its final completion.”
I could have closed my eyes and believed myself in Alderman Paddy Bauler’s saloon in Chicago. There is neither Blue nor Gray when you get down to the American essentials.
I said, gently, that I had come to talk politics, and asked him what he thought of Governor Long’s chances.
“I hear he’s on the steady improve all the time,” the Assessor said. “Fellas with him at Hot Springs tell me he’s champin’ at the bit to go. You can’t never count a Long out. Look at the form! Morrison and Dodd are past losers. They’ve been at the post before and found lacking. You can’t never tell what will happen, but if he run back to form, Earl got to win it all.” ♦
(This is the first of a series of three articles on Louisiana politics.)
